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Matinee: 'Joan Myers -- Fire & Ice'
6 April 2024
Saturday matinees long ago let us escape from the ordinary world to the island of the Swiss Family Robinson or the mutinous decks of the Bounty. Why not, we thought, escape the usual fare here with Saturday matinees of our favorite photography films?
So we're pleased to present the 547th in our series of Saturday matinees today: Joan Myers -- Fire & Ice.
In this 2:15 video from Boxcar Studio edited by Wendy Young, Joan Myers talks about photographing life on the edges. That would be the more extreme environments like the Arctic and the Antarctic.
"That's about as far out as you can get," she says.
Born in 1944 in Des Moines, Iowa, Myers had an early interest in the sciences and mathematics. At Stanford, she studied Renaissance and baroque music performance, which led to a BA in 1966 and an MA in musicology in 1967.
But in the early 1970s Myers turned to photography. Today she is comfortable with both digital and platinum-palladium processes and continues her exploration of hand-applied color.
Of those extremes, she says, "It's otherworldly and so awesomely beautiful that you don't want to leave."
We see exactly what she means as the video presents a number of her stunning images of places you simply don't see every day.
She first discovered volcanism in Antarctica, she tells us. "I climbed to the rim and looked down and heard this amazing sound of an open lava lake." She even liked the sulphur smell.
"Fire and ice, two poles of creation, energy, and destruction. Life is precarious on our fragile planet," she writes on her site of the project.
Precarious and beautiful, we might add.