It was these photos – soft blue tones, ice and water, the Arctic – about which I’ve recently happened to come across again. Photographs taken by a New Yorkan photographer and environmental activist called Diane Tuft . Since 1998 she’s been reporting on the beauty and fragility of our planet and environment with her camera. Before that she’d rather been focusing on multimedia.
The special thing about this, however, is that she relies on the sensitivity of infrared film which captures the light outside our visible specter. By doing this, she’s able to capture rays and reflections of the scenery in her photos which, otherwise, would remain hidden to us. On her trips she looks carefully for areas and places with particularly good conditions for her kind of photography. The locations include the Great Lakes, Utah, Iceland, Greenland, New Zealand, Antarctica and the Arctic Ocean. Infrared light, she says, is responsible for the special colors in her pictures. However, the fact the photos are so beautiful and look so good can be traced back to something rather negative: the expansion of the ozone “hole” and global warming. These two factors are responsible for the increase of the amount of ultraviolet and infrared light as well.
Diane Tuft explains the essence of her photos this way:
“My photographs capture a moment in time without spectral boundaries – a moment of infrared light and a moment of ultraviolet. These moments are never the same“.
Just like National Geographics photographer Paul Nicklen, with her photos she compels her observers in an aesthetic way. You simply remain stuck to the colors, the structures and the contents of the images. And at the same time she also explains the disadvantages and the worrisome state of our planet Earth. She makes the invisible and the existing, which we refuse to see, visible.
It’s really worth browsing her website, guys! Because among numerous photos you also find personal descriptions of Diane which contain a lot of interesting stuff!
