Mitch Dobrowner began photographing storms in 2005, traveling with professional storm chaser Roger Hill across the American West and Midwest. *Storms* gathers the resulting encounters with monsoons, tornadoes, massive thunderstorms, and the rotating supercells that can produce them. The weather here is neither backdrop nor illustration. It is the central subject: immense, unstable, and endowed with a presence that Dobrowner has described in almost animate terms.
Preparation is integral to the work. Dobrowner studied how storm systems form, then relied on Hill’s field knowledge to reach locations where atmospheric structure could be photographed as it unfolded. The resulting project joins scientific attention to timing, terrain, and meteorological complexity with the formal discipline of landscape photography. Clouds become volumes; rain and dust register as forces moving across open ground. While the photographs arise from hazardous and rapidly changing conditions, their larger context is the landscape tradition of the American West, including the exacting craftsmanship associated with Ansel Adams.
Published by Aperture in 2013, this 96-page hardcover was the first book devoted to Dobrowner’s storm photographs. Its substantial 35.5 × 24.5 cm format gives appropriate scope to a subject defined by scale, while the book form allows separate storms and territories to accumulate into a sustained study rather than a sequence of isolated spectacles. An introduction by writer Gretel Ehrlich considers both the phenomenon of storms and their place within representations of the Western landscape.
For a photobook collection, *Storms* merits attention as a concentrated account of one photographer’s long engagement with severe weather and as a meeting point between storm chasing and American landscape practice. Its significance rests not on sensational events alone, but on the transformation of fleeting atmospheric conditions into carefully structured pictures—and on Aperture’s presentation of the series as a coherent monograph.
