December 1, 2008
James Balog

Internationally acclaimed photographer James Balog is the founder and director of the Extreme Ice Survey. A former mountain guide with a graduate degree in geomorphology, James is equally at home on a Himalayan peak or a whitewater river, the African savannah or polar icecaps. James lives on a Rocky Mountain ridge top high above Boulder, Colorado with his wife Suzanne, and daughters Simone and Emily.

Solheim is my first love, the place where I first understood what climate change means to glaciers; the place where I first understood, in visual terms, how the dying terminus of a glacier could be visually fascinating; the one glacier I’ve come back to the most (seven trips to Iceland and at least 25 hikes into the glacier—and the work isn’t done yet) to make a photographic record of how this planet of ours is changing. In just one melt season we saw the ice retreat 245 feet; over a decade the glacier has retreated more than a third of a mile. In the triptych from 2005, I felt so strongly that these weird forms the ice had taken were humanoid. They spoke to me of time . . . of aging . . . of the mortal end that will come to all of us.