Earth's Album

Something from Yann Arthus-Bertrand's perspective in TIME.

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Earth's Album
Sunday, Jun. 30, 2002 By MARYANN BIRD/LONDON

The best picture the world has ever seen wasn't snapped by a professional photographer but by a man of science, the former U.S. astronaut William Anders. Taken in December 1968 from Apollo 8 — the first manned vehicle in lunar orbit — the image is of the earth rising above the moon's arid, lifeless horizon. Revealing the planet for the first time as a pristine blue and white jewel in the black void of space, the picture became an instant classic, inspiring poets and becoming a symbol of the ecology movement.

"It is truly the most beautiful photo ever taken," says Yann Arthus-Bertrand, 56, a French aerial photographer who for the past 10 years has been snapping shots of the planet from slightly closer range. He has taken more than 100,000 pictures of the earth in the past decade alone, capturing the stunning patterns and characteristics of the natural and manmade worlds. From those thousands, Arthus-Bertrand has chosen an evocative 155, enlarged them to more than 2 m wide, weatherproofed them and assembled them in a free, outdoor exhibition entitled "Earth from the Air: A Photographic Portrait of Our Planet." On display till late September in the east garden of London's Natural History Museum, the exhibition will travel around Britain. With duplicate prints, it is also running in France, Poland, Sweden and Germany and is due shortly in Norway, Russia, Hungary and Lebanon.

But Arthus-Bertrand's work is about much more than pretty pictures. The Parisbased photographer has assigned himself "the toughest project" — the open-ended task of recording the earth's environment as a benchmark for the future and accompanying his photos with words and statistics that place his images in a decidedly environmentalist context. "My job is to do a very strong picture that will give an emotional response," he says. "And the text is very, very important. My picture is nothing without it. The message is important."

The message is sustainable development, and respecting people and nature alike by changing production and consumption habits. Humans, says Arthus- Bertrand, have made their mark everywhere on the planet, particularly in the past 50 years. Through population growth and technological progress, they have dramatically transformed the earth's myriad landscapes. Arthus-Bertrand's themes in his photographic "state of the planet" cover the gamut of environmental and human- rights concerns: climate change, health care, food production, pollution, endangered species, water use, poverty, literacy, insecticides, garbage mountains, energy sources, women's rights, population issues, wildlife poaching, desertification and deforestation, and more.

A photo of a Finnish greenhouse in winter, eerily illuminated by artificial lighting, emphasizes the often uneasy relationship beween nature and agriculture. One of U.S. wheat fields prompts a refiection on agribusiness and the controversy surrounding biotechnology. Colorful bottle racks snapped in Germany bring comment about bottled water, plastic containers and the scourge of alcoholism. A shot of the world's largest offshore wind farm, in Denmark, raises the issue of fossil-fuel alternatives. A market in Kenya, where Western-donated goods are sold, illustrates the economic chasm between rich and poor nations. Arthus-Bertrand plans to work on the project for the rest of his life. "It's impossible to finish it," he says. "What you see here is the beginning. Other photographers will carry it on." To help them — and interested scientists — monitor the places he has visited, Arthus-Bertrand provides precise geographical coordinates. Most of his shots were taken from helicopters, in which he has clocked up more than 3,000 hours. "I'm not really an aerial photographer," he says. "I'm a photographer who uses helicopters." He considers them "magic toys," providing access to remote locations and the ability to hover over a landscape for long periods of time. "With a plane, you just steal the photograph as you fly over."

Arthus-Bertrand's environmental journey, which has so far included scores of countries, began in central France, where, as a young man, he managed a nature reserve. At 30, he moved to Kenya with his wife, Anne, to study lions in the Masai Mara reserve. There, he produced the first of some 70 books of photographs and, working as a hot-air balloon pilot taking tourists on wildlife-observation flights, developed a love for the vertical perspective. "People seeing the exhibition can see that, from a bird's-eye view, the world is a beautiful place," he says. "Close up, it is clear there are serious problems — and these are powerfully illustrated by the stark facts and statistics presented. Together they show why we should be concerned about the state of the world." He adds: "A photograph is so strong. Not everyone is going to think like me, but I speak with my photographs. It's easier that way. It's the earth itself that's a work of art, and we are all a part of nature. We choose the landscape of our soul."

From Arthus-Bertrand's perspective, his most powerful photograph is not of a Brazilian slum, a Philippine village inundated by mud or a quake-ravaged Turkish town. Rather, it is a view of the Ukrainian city of Pripiat in snow. Three kilometers from the now-closed Chernobyl nuclear plant, Pripiat is a ghost town, emptied of its 50,000 people. His feelings about the planet, though, are perhaps symbolized by the main photo used to promote the exhibition. Taken from above a mangrove swamp in Voh, New Caledonia, it captures a huge, naturally formed green heart.

Source : http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,267739,00.html

Below is the link for some samples of his work.

http://www.wecommunic8.com/EarthFromTheAir/Gallery/default.aspx