The Big Cloud

Description

Our culture is addicted to weather: hourly forecasts, apps, radio, TV channels, alerts, warnings, and watches. And understandably---our food, clothing, livelihoods, and, increasingly, safety are tied directly to the weather and climate change. In The Big Cloud, photographer Camille Seaman stands in front of tornados, at the edges of lightning storms, and in pelting hail under pitch-black skies to capture supercells and mammatus clouds in their often sublime and terrifying splendor. In these awe-inspiring photographs, Seaman's work is a potent reminder that there is no art more dramatic, in scale or emotion, than that created by nature. The Big Cloud includes an introduction by award-winning New Yorker science writer and author Alan Burdick (Out of Eden, Why Time Flies).

Camille Seaman is a TED Senior Fellow whose TED Talk on her photographs of supercell storms has garnered more than 1,600,000 views. Her previous book is Melting Away: A Ten-Year Journey through Our Endangered Polar Regions. She has received a National Geographic Award, and her photographs appear in publications including Time, the New York Times, and Men's Journal.

Editorial Reviews

Natural History

The brooding skyscapes, rendered in grays, blacks, and dark browns, capture moments of immense natural turmoil--a huge wedge tornado, crackling laceworks of lightning, opaque supercell clouds that resemble giants' feet bestriding the plains. The images impart a sense of profound human frailty in the face of nature's fury.