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Yellow poplar,
Liriodendron tulipifera,
Great Smoky Mountains, North Carolina
On April 29, James Balog '74 received the BC Arts Council's third annual Alumni Award for Distinguished Achievement. The honor coincided with an exhibit of Balog's work at the McMullen Museum of Art, drawn from his acclaimed 2004 series of photomosaics,
Tree: A New Vision of the American Forest.
Balog grew up in western New Jersey, "part of the first wave of suburbanization," he said in a Master Series interview on NikonNet. He took filmmaking courses at BC and an occasional photography workshop elsewhere, but considers himself essentially self-taught. A mountain climber and outdoorsman, Balog has shot on assignment for
National Geographic,
Time,
Smithsonian,
Audubon,
Outside,
Geo,
Paris-Match,
and
Stern.
In 1996, he became the first photographer to be awarded a commission for a plate of stamps by the U.S. Postal Service. The series depicted 15 endangered species and was inspired by his 1990 book
Survivors: A New Vision of Endangered Wildlife.
In his studies of animals and landscapes, Balog takes issue with those who seek to convey "the pure wilderness experience" in pictures. "I'm not going to try and pretend that a human being doesn't exist in the interaction between photographer and subject," he says. And so his wild animal shots are mostly portraits, often taken in a studio, individualistic and startling in their isolation from nature. For
Tree, Balog sought out the "largest, oldest, strongest trees in the United States," a six-year quest that took him from the Wye Oak (c. 1500–2002) on Maryland's Eastern Shore to the West Coast redwood Stratosphere Giant, at 369 feet the world's tallest tree. To produce images that admit to human encroachment on the landscape, Balog took inspiration from cubism and the photographic mosaics of David Hockney. To get the shots, he sometimes relied on his mountaineering skills to scale a neighboring tree.
The McMullen exhibit runs through July 12.
Click on a photo for a larger view and caption
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