Every landscape photographer sees the world through a camera’s lens, but how many of them are snapping frames thousands of feet above the Earth while piloting a plane with their feet?
That’s how Michael Collier finds art in geology: mountain ranges rumpled like a white bedspread, rivers as sinuous as Arabic script.
A new exhibit at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science chronicles Collier’s 30 years of hunting for stirring glimpses of the planet. The show, “Stones From the Sky,” features 45 photographs Collier has taken of the Earth, many shot in the American West.
“Understanding the planet itself and the record that is written in the geological formations is important to us,” said Jodi Schoemer, the museum’s director of temporary exhibitions. “So often you are looking at political maps or a weather map, but to really see the record, you need to understand that the Earth is not still. It’s a changing, dynamic place.
“I think these photos help record that dynamism.”
Plenty of photographers spend their lives documenting the natural world, but few are as accomplished at capturing it, from a bird’s-eye view, as Collier, Schoemer said. When museum executives learned about the traveling exhibit, they were eager to schedule it.
The exhibit comes at geology from an artistic perspective, an approach that Schoemer said she and others at the museum champion.
“We like to share places where art and science meet in our museum,” she said. “We think that’s another way of appreciating and understanding science.”
Collier, a geologist and family physician in Arizona, takes many of his photos while flying his plane. He is known for engaging in serious aerobatics to get his shots.
The photographer needs more than dramatic geology. He requires elusive combinations of light and shadow, too.
To capture what he wants, Collier noses the plane down into canyons, soars over remote Alaskan ranges, spirals the Cessna along winding rivers — all while steering with his feet, leaning out the window with his Pentax, and clicking away.
“The detail is incredible,” Schoemer said. “It’s pretty amazing, the lengths he will go to to get these photographs.
“Anybody who has gotten a thrill looking out a plane window, that’s what it looks like,” she said. “You get that epiphany. Anybody who has ever felt that will enjoy this.”
Douglas Brown: 303-954-1395 or djbrown@denverpost.com
Stones From the Sky
Through Aug. 2
Leprino Family Atrium; Denver Museum of Nature & Science
Free to members. Non-members must pay museum admission of $11 per adult and $6 for children and seniors
This story has been corrected in this online archive to clarify admission information.
