James Balog
2025 Honoree / Humanitarian Award
For 40 years, visionary environmental photographer James Balog (pronounced Bay’-log) has broken new conceptual and artistic ground on human modification of nature, one of the most important issues of our era. As an activist, public educator, and global spokesman, he has had world-wide influence about the reality and immediacy of the climate change crisis. In the course of producing his ground-breaking portfolios, James gave birth to visual concepts, treatments, and technologies that have influenced and inspired image makers worldwide.
During the first phase of his career, he was a photojournalist specializing in projects involving landscape, outdoor adventure, wildlife, and technology. Publications like National Geographic, Time, Life, Fortune, Smithsonian, the New York Times Magazine, and many others in Europe and Asia regularly presented his work.
An extended study of the plight of wild animals in a changing world—originally published in 1990 as Survivors: A New Vision of Endangered Wildlife—took his work into new dimensions. The series, mostly self-produced, was exhibited at dozens of museums and galleries in the United States and Europe. It also led to three additional books and a commission to create a plate of stamps on American endangered wildlife for the U. S. Postal Service (the first time a single photographer was honored with a solo commission).
Between 1991 and 1995, James probed the intersection of people and technology in a series he named Techno Sapiens; and in Anima, created a meditation on our relationship with nature as seen through portraits of humans juxtaposed with our nearest genetic relative, chimpanzees. From 1998 to 2004, he produced portraits of America’s largest, oldest arboreal citizens—which were, at the same time, a study of deforestation—in Tree: A New Vision of the American Forest.
A 2005 project in Iceland for The New Yorker led to a creative breakthrough about how to reveal climate change through photography of receding glaciers. In 2007, Balog founded the Extreme Ice Survey (EIS), the most wide-ranging, ground-based, photographic study of glaciers ever conducted. His invention of time-lapse cameras that could withstand the rigors of the polar winter was essential to that effort. EIS was the basis of the documentaries Chasing Ice (2012), which won an Emmy and the Sundance award for cinematography; Chasing Time (2024); the 2009 PBS/NOVA special Extreme Ice; three feature stories in National Geographic magazine (2007, 2010, and 2013); and ongoing global television, radio, internet, and print media coverage.
EIS became just one of many projects within Earth Vision Institute (EVI), which Balog founded in 2014. EVI’s award-winning 2018 film, The Human Element, captured the lives of Americans on the front lines of environmental change. In 2021, ideas and imagery embodied in the film expanded into The Human Element: A Time Capsule from the Anthropocene, a 425-page retrospective monograph summarizing James’ lifetime of environmental photography.
Balog is the Cornell University A.D. White Professor-at-Large. He is a recipient of the Heinz Award; the Hood Medal and Honorary Fellowship at the Royal Photographic Society; the Ansel Adams Award from the Sierra Club; the Hamdan International Photography Award (Dubai); the International Photography Hall of Fame “Visionary” Award; the American Geophysical Union Presidential Citation; the Aspen Institute Award for Visual Art and Design; an honorary doctorate from the University of Alberta, and many other accolades. He is a research associate of the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research at the University of Colorado.
His photographs have been exhibited in hundreds of art museums and galleries. They are permanently archived at the U.S. Library of Congress, Cornell University, and Yale University. They have been acquired by fine art museums in Houston, Denver, San Diego, Salem (MA), Stanford University, and dozens of private collections. The National Snow and Ice Data Center preserves all 1.5 million frames from the EIS time-lapse cameras. The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago has had a permanent photo-and-film exhibition about EIS on display for nearly a decade.
Balog has given multimedia presentations at an extraordinary range of venues. They include the White House, U.S. Congress, and United Nations headquarters in New York; the UN meetings on climate change in Dubai (2023), Paris (2015), and Copenhagen (2009); Earth Day (on the Washington, D.C. mall), the Richmond Forum, the Field Museum (Chicago), Denver Museum of Nature and Science, and Vanity Fair’s New Establishment Summit; corporations such as Apple, Qualcomm, and Bloomberg; dozens of universities, including MIT, Cornell, Duke, Stanford, Boston College, Penn State, and the universities of Buffalo, Colorado, Indiana, Iowa, Miami, Missouri, and Washington; the Halki Summit II, sponsored by Patriarch Bartholomew of the Greek Orthodox Church; the California Academy of Sciences, Cryosphere 2022 (Reykjavik, Iceland), and the distinguished lecture, “Frontiers in Geophysics” at the American Geophysical Union.
Born in 1952, James is the father of two daughters. He and his wife Suzanne live at the foot of the Rocky Mountains in Boulder, Colorado. An avid adventurer, he has done thousands of hikes and technical climbs in the Himalaya, Andes, Alaska, Africa, and the U.S; made long ski traverses on two continents; and floated wilderness rivers in the Arctic and American West.
Website: earthvisioninstitute.org
James Balog portrait by Greg Gorman
