James Balog (born July 15, 1952) is an American photographer whose work explores the relationship between humans and nature.

While working on his undergraduate degree in geology at Penn State University, he became an avid adventurer, making frequent trips to the White Mountains of New Hampshire and the wilderness rivers of Maine.

While working on a master's degree in geomorphology at the University of Colorado, he honed his photography skills during frequent climbing trips.

He began with a series of documentary photography assignments for magazines such as Mariah (the predecessor to Outside), Smithsonian and National Geographic,[2] work he continues today.

Since the early 1980s, Balog has photographed subjects such as endangered animals, North America's old-growth forests, and polar ice.

With methodology that combines time-lapse imagery with conventional photography and video, EIS, now in its second decade of field operations, is the world's most extensive ground-based photographic glacier study to date.

EIS supplements the time-lapse record by occasionally repeating shots at fixed locations in Iceland, Bolivia, the Canadian province of British Columbia, Mt.

The artwork draws on insights from a variety of fields, including visual arts, environmental philosophy, and Jungian psychology.

[citation needed] ANIMA[n 2] asks readers to imagine a healthier, more integrated relationship between humans and nature.

Instead of capturing his subjects in nature with a telephoto lens, he photographed them in non-natural settings, often against white backdrops, to emphasize their vulnerability.

[citation needed] For the Tree series,[n 5] Balog wanted to photograph some of world's tallest tre in their full grandeur, but he realized that his subjects were far too large to capture in a single frame.

David Holbrooke's 2006 documentary film A Redwood Grows in Brooklyn[n 6] explores his thoughts about art, nature, and perception.

[14]Balog views photography as a form of visual evidence that can influence people's perception of the world around them: I’ve believed for a long time that photographers are like the antennae of civilization.

[15]Among his artistic influences, Balog counts Irving Penn,[14] Richard Avedon,[14] Carleton Watkins, William Henry Jackson, Edward Weston, Robert Adams, Eliot Porter, Eugene Smith, and Cornell Capa.

Outside photography, he draws inspiration from the entire range of arts, including music, literature, painting, filmmaking, sculpture, and architecture.

[citation needed] Early in his career, Balog concentrated on man's direct impact on nature, producing a series on nuclear missile silos in the agrarian landscapes of the American West.