![]() ![]() “It was fantastic.”Įach day on his expeditions, Fishman wanders, scanning the landscape for promising compositions. “We were like, well, it’s a different flavor than what we’ve got, and it’s only four years out of date. The team had grown tired of the spaghetti they’d packed. While staying at an abandoned mining camp in Greenland this year, they found nine-year-old freeze-dried food. They bring two camera setups (he shoots with a Hasselblad H6D medium format camera) and two drone setups. He and his crew map out where they’ll fly, where they’ll stay, what dangers they might encounter (polar bears, for example). “We plan with extreme detail because once you’re there, there’s no camera shops, no ,” Fishman says. “All of a sudden, I started to feel and see the planet differently.”Ĭapturing his transformational images in vast, remote reaches is no easy feat. “It literally was one of those moments, a sort of inflection point where your life changes in a way that you couldn't imagine,” he says. He credits Melissa Shoemaker, his creative and project coordinator, for suggesting that he try aerial photography. I could turn you into a shish kebab, but I know that you are not here to harm me,’ ” Fishman says. The elephant shook its trunk and its ears, moved its head slowly from side to side, then turned and walked away. “All I could visualize was myself becoming a shish kebab,” Fishman says. The 6,000-pound creature, a mere six feet away, stopped and looked directly at him. When it sidestepped the vehicle, he slid around and looked up, camera at the ready. One came so close that all Fishman could see was part of its leg and part of its trunk. In Africa, hoping to capture the perfect shot of an elephant on a nearly 100-degree day, he scooted under his guide’s vehicle and waited for the behemoths to pass by. He has endured frigid whiteout conditions in Antarctica in search of Emperor penguins and close encounters with polar bears in the Arctic. ![]() And what we cherish, we protect.”įishman has long created intimate portraits of the natural world, often going to extremes to get those shots. “You see it both as a need and as something to cherish. ![]() “You treat water differently when it’s something you value and you feel is important and core to your existence,” Fishman says. He hopes the photographs will spur viewers to think of water as something more than a commodity, that they will spark a connection between our bodies, 60 percent composed of water, and the planet, 70 percent covered in water. ![]() “By sort of swimming in the image and flowing with the image,” he says, “it becomes theirs.”Ĭentral to the work is Fishman’s view of water as a symbol of transformation-not only the element itself, shifting between solid and liquid states, but also its power in sculpting terrain. “By eliminating any familiar context, you have to respond first to the artwork in a very emotional, visceral way,” he says, and this forces people to use their imaginations in puzzling out what’s before them. Aside from the images of icebergs, which are labeled with their proper names, he titles each photo only with colors. Viewers perusing the resulting ethereal, abstract images, currently on exhibit at the Post Gallery in Big Sur, California, could be excused for not knowing exactly what they’re looking at-in fact, that’s what Fishman is aiming for. At least that’s the case when the photographer is hanging out the open doorway of a helicopter, suspended in midair while shooting straight down to capture stunning aerial images of Greenland and Iceland.įishman, who is based in California, has made multiple monthlong trips to the two islands in the far north to photograph icebergs, ice sheets, glaciers, rivers, and oceans for his ongoing project, Transformation: Water as Art. For Roger Fishman, remembering to buckle up is no trivial matter it’s the difference between life and death. ![]()
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