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James Balog

The creative person I have chosen to study for my creative individual paper was James Balog. James lives in Boulder, Colorado, and is famously known as a photographer who expresses the relationship between humans and nature within his work. James had previously emphasized endangered animals, old-growth forests, and polar ice within his photography. In 2007 his art took a major shift. James wanted to further combine the insights from art and science to produce an innovative, shocking, and most eye-opening depiction of our changing world. He is passionate about climate change and wanted to express its impacts within his photography. It took him a while to figure out a way he would be able to express climate change within his photography, ultimately deciding that the world's glaciers are the best evidence for the climate's increasing temperature. 

As previously mentioned, James set out in 2007 on his best-known project, where he began to study the impact of climate change on the world's glaciers. James was able to conduct the world's most wide-ranging ground-based photographic glacier study that has ever been conducted, tilted The Extreme Ice Survey. His work was then showcased in National Geographic in June 2007 as well as in the 2009 NOVA documentary entitled Extreme Ice. 

After that, James went on to film his own documentary which premiered in January of 2012, which is where I first came to know about him. The documentary is called Chasing Ice and it journies through his study of The Extreme Ice experiment as well as the years that came after that. The story becomes a bit more personal for James, as he is struggling to keep up physically while making his trips to Greenland to see the glaciers. James undergoes his third knee surgery in the documentary yet is still able to continue on with photographing the glaciers. 

Since his documentary Chasing Ice premiered in 2012, James has gone on to write seven books such as Ice: Portraits of the World's Vanishing Glaciers. And in January of 2016, James was part of the production on a feature-length documentary, The Human Element. James has received many awards for his work that he has done. 

If you are interested in any of James's work I highly suggest watching his 75-minute documentary Chasing Ice! I have linked a trailer to the film within this post! While I have provided a sort of thorough summary here within this post, the trailer to his documentary does a great job of truly expressing how creative James is with his photography!

I have also linked James's Extreme Ice Survey website here AND his photography portfolio site where you can see all of his mindblowing portraits and time-lapses of the climate's changing circumstances 








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