Cloud physics
American photographer Terri Weifenbach’s long-term series is a luminous photographic consideration of atmospheric phenomena, visual perception and life on Earth. In Cloud Physics, she explores the vital interconnection of our planet’s clouds and the intimate forms and textures of its biological life.
The backbone of this work is a series of photographs (for which she received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2015) produced at an American research facility used for the study and measurement of clouds, their origin, structure, particles and solar relationships. The exotic instruments she portrays are designed to express ephemeral atmospheric phenomena as sets of numeric data, yet Weifenbach’s camera (and her way of seeing) renders our organic terrestrial world an unquantifiable mystery. The vibrant scenes of her wide-ranging images — tiny variations of light, humidity, fire and lightning; iridescent mists and vapors; glimpses of the animal kingdom and the plant world — are like myths-within-myths unfolding throughout the book, against a backdrop of endless weather events.
