The New Yorker - Alan Burdick* | Photography Camille Seaman*
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Kansas, May, 2008. Photographs by Camille Seaman / Courtesy Princeton Architectural Press
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A
cloud is a shade in motion.
Shape-shifting and moody, it arrives with a message that is opaque as
often as it is threatening. “Clouds always tell a true story,” the
Scottish meteorologist Ralph Abercromby wrote, in 1887, “but one which
is difficult to read.”
The appeal of
clouds
is obvious: no two are the same, and no one is the same for long. And
they not only manifest change but inflict it as well. A cloud can be
beautiful, terrible, or both—the embodiment of the sublime. Few other
things on earth still present us with a power larger than ourselves. To
watch
a supercell gather force over the plains, as storm chasers take such
pleasure in doing, is to watch Zeus take shape on earth. We’ve learned
enough over the centuries to know that clouds aren’t supernatural;
rather, fiercely condensed and sweeping, they represent all
that is natural, and we stand beneath them awed and merely human.
But
our relationship to clouds is changing, growing hazy. In 1803, Luke
Howard, a British pharmacist, proposed a classification scheme that has
mostly stayed with us. It introduced four basic kinds of clouds—
cirrus,
stratus,
cumulus, and
nimbus
(the Latin words for curl, layer, mass, and rain)—as well as an array
of subcategories that recognized the fact that one kind of cloud could
turn into another. Recently, meteorologists have added several new cloud
types to that known pantheon, and some of them describe clouds that are
created by us:
Cumulus homogenitus names the cloud formation produced by smokestacks and steam plants;
Cirrus homomutatus are the high-elevation condensation trails produced by airplanes.
We
are changing the face of the sky. And we are altering its mood;
scientists hesitate to link specific storms to global warming, but it’s
clear that, on the whole, climate change is making extreme-weather
events more powerful and, perhaps, more common. When we look up,
increasingly the face we see is ours. In the photographer Camille
Seaman’s cloudscapes, it’s difficult to not also see humankind’s
self-portrait: potent, defiant, unforgiving. Clouds always tell a true
story, Ralph Abercromby said, and more than ever the story they tell is
the story of ourselves. Where that story will take us is difficult to
read.
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Nebraska, June, 2012. |
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Nebraska, June, 2012. |
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Kansas, June, 2008. |
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Kansas, May, 2008. |
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Kansas, May, 2013. |
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Texas, June, 2014. |
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Kansas, May, 2008. |
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South Dakota, May, 2011. |
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Texas, May, 2012. |
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