James Balog

James Balog (pronounced BAY-log; born July 15, 1952) is an American photographer whose work explores the relationship between humans and nature. Since the early 1980s Balog has photographed such subjects as endangered animals, North America’s old-growth forests, and polar ice. His work aims to combine insights from art and science to produce innovative, dynamic and sometimes shocking interpretations of our changing world.Balog’s best-known project explores the impact of climate change on the world’s glaciers. In 2007 he initiated the Extreme Ice Survey, the most wide-ranging ground-based photographic glacier study ever conducted. National Geographic magazine showcased Balogs ice work in June 2007 and June 2010, and the project is featured in the 2009 NOVA documentary Extreme Ice as well as the 75-minute film Chasing Ice, which premiered in January 2012. Balog’s book Ice: Portraits of the World’s Vanishing Glaciers summarizes the work of the Extreme Ice Survey through 2012.Balog has received many awards for his work, including the Royal Photographic Society Hood Medal, a 2010 Heinz Award, the Duke University LEAF Award, the Same Rose 58 and Julie Walters Prize for Global Environmental Activism at Dickinson College, the Aspen Institutes Visual Arts & Design Award, the Rowell Award for the Art of Adventure, the Leica Medal of Excellence, and the International League of Conservation Photographers League Award. He was the North American Nature Photography Associations Outstanding Photographer of the Year in 2008 and PhotoMedia’s Person of the Year for 2011. In 1996 he became the first photographer ever commissioned by the U.S. Postal Service to create a full set of stamps. He is the author of seven books, including Extreme Ice Now: Vanishing Glaciers and Changing Climate: A Progress Report (2009), Tree: A New Vision of the American Forest (2004), and Survivors: A New Vision of Endangered Wildlife (1990), hailed as a conceptual breakthrough in nature photography.Balog received an Honorary Doctor of Science Degree from the University of Alberta. As a consequence of this historic work, in 2009, he served as a U.S./NASA representative at the United Nations Conference on Climate Change (COP-15) in Copenhagen. In 2015, he made four presentations at COP-21 in Paris.In January 2016, Balog began production on another feature-length documentary film, Life Tectonic (working title), exploring the environmental effects of the Anthropocene. The film is scheduled to debut in early 2018.He is a founding Fellow of the International League of Conservation Photographers. He lives in the foothills of the Rockies above Boulder, Colorado, with his wife, Suzanne, and two daughters.

Bio from Wikipedia - See more on en.wikipedia.org Text under CC-BY-SA license