Nebraskan photographer Kevin Erskine captures epic doings in the skies over the Great Plains, where layers of cool and warm, dry and humid air clash to create tornadoes, lightning, and, if conditions are right, an especially combustible tempest called the supercell - a massive swirling thunderstorm whose powerful updrafts often precede twisters. A longtime "storm chaser," he has produced a catalogue of atmospheric sculptures whose monikers - wall cloud, mammatus, inflow band, mothership - evoke, as do the images themselves, both the primal and the futuristic. Of course, the imminent doom isn't merely figurative, as the volume's very last photo makes clear: Spread over two pages are the splintered, gnarled remains of homes and trees where a tornado touched down in Greensburg, Kansas, in 2007.

At the age of twelve, Kevin Erskine (born 1956) witnessed his first big storm: a category four tornado with wind speeds of over 207 miles per hour that raged through the center of his hometown of Hoskins, Nebraska. Fascinated and inspired by this immense force of nature, Erskine began taking his first photographs with his father's camera. Kevin Erskine: Supercell collects 120 of his most stunning large-format portraits of supercells: the least common, often isolated and frequently most severe of all thunderstorms. The photographs depict enormous cloud masses in continually shifting formations: encroaching thunderstorms and pitching tornados create a rich palette that ranges from luminescent periwinkle grandeur to an almost apocalyptic darkness swallowing a red evening sun. In these visions of flat, threatened landscapes under collapsing atmospheres, Erskine masterfully demonstrates the ambivalence between the terrifying force of nature and its stunning beauty.

Introduction

Richard Hamblyn

Plates

Ascension

Redmond O'Hanlon

Biography

Author Biographies