Welcome back to the fourth instalment in our series, Far-Flung. Eva Clifford is speaking to the best landscape and wildlife photographers from all over the globe about the vistas that have charmed and thrilled their lenses.
For the fourth trip on our Far-Flung adventure, we plunge into the elements with photographer Camille Seaman, who’s work has continuously engaged with the effects of climate change through the depiction of icebergs, storms and other natural phenomena.
Camille had been photographing in the Arctic and Antarctic for almost a decade before she came across storm chasing. Her photographs capture the otherworldly colours that precede tornadoes and the desolate landscapes we imagine to be totally silent, save for the rumble of the incoming chaos and the eerie tornado sirens in nearby towns.
On The Run – Nebraska, USA, June 2008
On the evening of May 31, 2013, a black wind crept over the plains southeast of El Reno, Oklahoma. “There was a feeling the whole day of foreboding, you ever just know when something doesn’t feel right?” says photographer Camille Seaman, recounting the experience from her home in Ireland.
Though she’d been storm chasing on and off for five years and was familiar with the unpredictable violence of the elements, something was different about that day. In just thirty seconds, the width of the whirlwind had expanded from 1 mile to 2.6 miles – the widest tornado ever recorded. As it raked across Canadian County the tornado grew in pace and intensity, with wind speeds exceeding 300 mph.
Tim Samaras was a colleague of Camille’s, a veteran chaser and scientist with an uncanny ability to predict the paths of tornadoes. Joined by his 24-year-old son and meteorologist Carl Young, he was conducting lightning research on the ground, collecting data from the tornado’s rotating eye. But tragically, that storm would be their last as all three were among the 13 killed by the El Reno tornado.
Just a mile behind them, Camille and her team were driving east towards the eye. “It was very dark ahead,” she recalls. “All the cars were just going into the darkness and in front of us, this power line came down like gates across the road and of course, we had to stop and we were all like, this doesn’t feel right, let’s look for an exit… So we turned and left.”
That decision may have saved her life.
Born in Long Island, New York, Camille comes from a small whaling tribe known as the Shinnecock. Growing up surrounded by nature, she was raised in an Indigenous way to know our connection with the planet.
When she was six, her grandfather took her and her cousin out in the humid New York summer. “There were no clouds and no shade, but he made us sit in the sun,” says Camille, who knew not to question her grandfather when he was in teaching mode.
“After a while we were wilting and sweating and really at extremes, and he said: ‘do you see that? Your sweat?’ And he pointed up to the sky at this little cloud and said: ‘that’s your sweat that makes that cloud, that becomes the rain, that waters the plants, that feed the animals, that feed us.’
“So something about storm chasing was about looking at all that water and knowing it was part of us.”
Rain Over Fields of Gold – Kansas, USA, May 2008
Camille had been photographing in the Arctic and Antarctic for almost a decade before she came across storm chasing.
“Like so many things in my life, storm chasing wasn’t something that was like, ‘oh I always wanted to do that’,” says Camille. “For me, it was this incredibly short notice, impromptu, serendipitous affair.”
In 2008, her daughter (then aged 8) was watching a Nat Geo storm chasers programme on TV and she said, ‘Mom, you should do that!’ Intrigued, Camille ran a quick google search and opened a whole world that she wasn’t even aware of.
“I sent an email to [a storm chase leader] and said, ‘I’m really interested in doing this, please let me know if anyone cancels’ and less than an hour later, he emails me back and says, ‘can you be here in three days? I just had a spot come open.’”
Three days later, Camille was on a plane from California to Oklahoma, and from there she began her first chase. “As is typical with storm chasing there’s a lot of driving involved so you may start in Oklahoma, but you may end up all the way up near the Canadian border, just chasing these storms,” says Camille.
ArrayThe Great Deluge – Kansas, USA, May 2008
“The way these storms work is all this warm, moist air is being pushed up from the Gulf of Mexico… and it’s hitting the jet stream that comes down from the Pacific Northwest, just as it’s curving, so what it does is it starts to put a spin, a vortex, on this air and that’s how you get these individual clouds that form in the middle of nowhere.”
“What a lot of people don’t understand [about tornadoes] is that they are one cloud. If you watch it on the satellite, it looks like this one cotton ball blowing up. By the jet stream putting a cap on this upward heat and potentially a spin, all that energy has nowhere to go… and that’s called a supercell. Only 2% of supercells produce tornadoes, so it’s really a numbers game. You have to do a lot of chasing if a tornado is what you’re after.”
Tornadoes – unlike hurricanes – are harder to forecast because they’re smaller and form rapidly. That’s why chases depend on the skill of the leader, who assesses all of the data and weather models, and locates the point where the tornado is most likely to occur.
Mammatus Clouds IV – Nebraska, USA, June 2008
“Many people have this very romantic idea [of storm chasing] from the movies, but it’s really not fun,” admits Camille. “Driving, gross gas station toilets, bad food, strange, small towns; it’s a very unusual endeavour. You’re potentially driving a thousand miles a day just to get to [a storm]. We would usually commit to staying with a storm until it was too dark to drive, then find a local motel or hotel and stay the night, then get up and do it all again.”
Storm chasing draws people from all over the world and from all walks of life. Camille has chased with teachers, musicians, nurses, retired people and bodybuilders. “Anybody can be attracted to this,” she says.
“There is something incredibly powerful and beautiful about it. Honestly, there’s nothing like it. And I think there’s some part of your primal brain that knows it’s not normal to go towards one of these things, it’s not normal to stay out and exposed.”
The Collapse III – South Dakota, USA, June 2008
As well as the tornado itself, there’s lightning and hail – some of which can be the size of a grapefruit. “If one of these hits you in the head, it’s over,” says Camille. “Also, many of the roads in rural America are unpaved, so it’s quite possible that you end up stuck in the mud or a ditch and then the storm comes and you have no shelter.”
But for some, heading directly into a tornado’s midst is the objective. Camille says she regularly saw chasers in armoured vehicles specifically designed to withstand destructive storms.
“That’s called ‘punching the core’ and basically it’s putting yourself in the path of a tornado,” explains Camille. “I’ve been in there, in the core, about two or three times and it’s just darkness, it’s oblivion; as a photographer there’s nothing in there.”
Camille has witnessed flying pigs and things that shouldn’t be moving through the air. But for her, she prefers to focus on the quiet magnitude of supercells.
Looking for Rotation (H) – Kansas, USA, May 2008
Her photographs capture the otherworldly colours that precede tornadoes and the desolate landscapes we imagine to be totally silent, save for the rumble of the incoming chaos and the eerie tornado sirens in nearby towns.
As storm chasing is such a tactile experience, there are limits to a photograph in place of firsthand experience. “There are smells: that smell of the pavement in the summer right before it rains, and the smell of the grass, or the wheat, or the corn,” says Camille. “There’s this warm air and then suddenly that warm air can be freezing cold as the storm collapses. It’s really something to behold with your own body, eyes and senses.”
the desolate landscapes we imagine to be totally silent, save for the rumble of the incoming chaos and the eerie tornado sirens in nearby towns
Of course, storm chasing is not without controversy and chasers can inadvertently slide under the stereotype of ‘disaster tourists’.
“You have to have compassion,” says Camille. “These are peoples’ homes being destroyed, potentially lives. Often, we’d go through small towns and the people there would know who we were, look nervous and ask: is it coming this way? Others saw us as a bad omen.”
Yet Camille adds that the majority of tornadoes reported are spotted by storm chasers: “If not for storm chasers there would be much more fatalities, much more damage because we are the eyes out there.”
Although Tornado Alley in the U.S. is a particularly tornado-prone region, Camille points out that tornadoes can occur anywhere, if the conditions are right.
Despite the frequency of tornadoes remaining relatively unchanged, tornadoes do seem to be getting larger and more destructive. “Part of that could be because there is more population in those areas, more development, therefore more damage,” says Camille. “I don’t know if there’s a scientific conclusion either way, because of climate change there are definitely more chances of extreme weather. When you have warmer oceans, it’s this warm ocean energy that gives fuel to these storms.”
Chasing The Storm – Kansas, USA, May 2008
The El Reno tornado of 2013 – and the loss of her colleagues – was a turning point for Camille, a stark realisation that even the most experienced chasers can’t predict what a tornado will do. “That trauma just changed it; it wasn’t the same after that,” she says. “I just knew it was time to do something else.”
Since moving to Ireland last year, Camille continues to photograph and remains committed to making photographs that show that humans are not separate from our environment, that everything we do has an impact.
“There is no separate-ness,” she says. “I don’t know how to articulate it in a way that someone who wasn’t raised in the way that I was would understand it, except to make these images and hopefully give people an access point to something that they may not have experienced in their entire life.”
