Had I taken these photographic sequences of ice twenty or more years ago they would have been predominantly about form and color, abstraction and distortion, landscape and remoteness, space and motion, time and transition. Indeed, all these elements have greatly motivated me and the theme of transition is something I have explored to varying degrees in almost all my work. But now there is an additional, urgent underlying message that is attached. Ice has become the canary in the coal mine and thus a symbol of climate change on a warming planet.

Scientists observe and measure the amounts of sea ice and the depth of ice sheets at the polar regions of both the Arctic and Antarctic to determine how quickly the earth’s ice is melting. Melting ice sheets, such as those on Greenland and Antarctica, are great cause for concern. Sea levels are rising at an alarming rate. Retreating glaciers worldwide place an exclamation point on these observations.

For these very same reasons, many artists have been drawn to ice as a subject. In this series of sequences, I have photographed both sea ice and glacial ice - more commonly known as icebergs. The former, which is sea water that freezes in winter and melts in summer, does not add to sea level rise. However, the diminishing amount of sea ice provides further evidence of an earth which is warming more rapidly than was predicted just a few years ago. Glacial ice, which is frozen fresh water from densely compacted snowfall over millennia, does add to sea level rise as it comes off the land and calves into the sea from glaciers. Such accelerating threats to our coast will be more fully explored in my current book project, East Coast: Tropic to Arctic, to be published in fall/winter, 2016.

East Coast: Arctic to Tropic

photographs from the forthcoming book

release date: fall/winter 2016



Our Whereabouts



West coast vistas have been an ongoing subject for American landscape photographers since the mid nineteenth century. Documentation and exploration of the West intensified after the end of the Civil War and has continued to the present day. As a grand subject, except for isolated portions, the east coast has been largely ignored – possibly because there is a perception that the scenery is just not as impressive as the mountains, volcanoes, sea stacks and cliffs that run the length of the Pacific Coast from the Aleutian Islands in the Bering Sea to the tip of the Baja Peninsula. – a coastline that I passionately photographed for a decade.

After my first book, West Coast:Bering to Baja, was released in 2012, it was not readily apparent to me that I would turn my attention to a companion book on the East Coast At first glance, I too thought the terrain of the east coast would be too uniform to sustain an in depth book project – a view that I soon found to be completely ill-informed and mistaken.

My attention quickly returned there after Hurricane Sandy wreaked havoc on New York City and the Jersey shore. I drove to Seaside Heights to view the famed roller coaster that was now tossed into the surf off the collapsed boardwalk. Farther north, in the shore town of Mantoloking, I saw houses floating in Barnegat Bay. Most of the homes facing the Atlantic were totally destroyed.

I now wanted to somehow show the fragility and the vulnerability of these affected areas to a warming climate and did a great amount of research on the subject. I quickly realized that, to do so, I had to photograph much of the Atlantic Seaboard from the air and place our great coastal cities and communities into an environmental context with the ocean. Paradoxically, that same aerial vantage point shows an overwhelming abstract beauty outlined by the shapes of bays, inlets, estuaries, wetlands and rivers that occupy its entire length and oftentimes includes the impressive roadways and bridges that connect us. Clouds became our mountains, sometimes foreboding.

My first aerial views were images of New York City which appears to be precariously floating on water with nowhere to go when the sea moves up and in. Venturing north to the Arctic Circle, one witnesses massive amounts of ice tumbling out of Greenland’s Jacobshavn Ice Fjord - a humbling experience. Photographs from ground and sea level provide the needed complementary view that most people observe. The interconnections of a melting ice sheet to a populated city become quite apparent.

After photographing all the major coastal cities, the barrier islands, the national parks and many of the national wildlife refuges from the arctic to the tropics, I could readily see that it was water, water everywhere and that the albatross was firmly around our collective necks. Penance is now due for the modern mariner.

After 3.5 billion years of life on earth, Homo Sapiens only recently evolved to its present form, about 100,000 years ago, and has proven to be a rather intrusive, often destructive anomaly – the only species with the intelligence and ability to create a worldwide civilization that requires a tremendous amount of outside energy to manufacture and fuel it. We have built almost all of our major cities, for reasons of commerce, trade and transportation, on the world’s oceans and seas. We also like to build our homes there. We are drawn to the sea and have a compulsion to live on the water’s edge. Fully 40% of the world’s population lives within 40 miles of an ocean coastline. One could say that the whereabouts of water has determined the whereabouts of humans.

As a result, the only climate that really matters is the one in which we find ourselves. To build our myriad societies, we have consumed enormous amounts of fossil fuels over the last 150 years and have pushed atmospheric CO2 levels to record numbers. We are at a point where a rapid warming effect is in place and altering the climate that presently supports us.

The evidence is clear. It is our own doing. An undoing will be daunting at best especially when there is political opposition for purely ideological reasons and science is purposefully ignored. Fortunately, I do see these walls of resistance crumbling as more and more people understand the reality of the situation. I fear it too late to prevent very serious consequences but there is still time, maybe, to mitigate the effect if immediate, drastic action is taken to reduce our carbon output. We shall see.

These photographs provide a record of our whereabouts, celebrate our planet, reveal impressive engineering yet illuminate our dire predicament on the east coast of North America as of AD, 2013-2015.