High Altitude Exposure
Oil encroaching on a Brown Pelican rookery during breeding season in Barataria Bay, Louisiana. The white forms on the island are juveniles; until recently the species was seriously endangered. Photo: J. Henry Fair
An open window on an airplane in flight is not a good sign—except when aerial photographer J. Henry Fair is one of the passengers. Bouncing over the South Carolina coast in a comically tiny Cessna 172—a burnt-orange interior betraying its 1975 vintage—Fair spots something that catches his eye, then jerks open the glass hatch on the aircraft’s door.
A deafening roar accompanied by hurricane-force wind fill the cockpit, making the plane’s roller-coaster jolts seem all the more life-threatening. Fair isn’t fazed. Shedding his seatbelt, he leans out the window, pointing his Pentax 645 at the coastal strip of Kiawah Island strung out below. As a boy growing up in nearby Charleston, he and his friends used to visit that nearly uninhabited barrier island in search of wild boar. Now the once-untouched shores are punctuated by 6,000-square-foot mansions with aquamarine pools and private decks.
“They’ve pretty much made Kiawah Island into a golf course,” observes pilot Robin Bowers. “The development really does go on and on.”
“My God,” Fair replies, shutting the window on the scene.
Fair, a self-described artist and environmental activist, uses his work to raise awareness about the cost of our dependence on natural resources. But unlike many artists with similar motives, he steers clear of “oily bird” photos, as he puts it. Instead, he takes to the sky, creating large-scale portraits of the planetary scars left by tar sands extraction, mountaintop removal, oil spills, and more. The resulting images are both chillingly beautiful abstractions and frightening testaments to the havoc wrought—but rarely seen or considered—by our industrial pursuits.
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http://www.audubon.org/magazine/may-june-2015/high-altitude-exposure
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