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Matt Payne
Matt Payne is a landscape photographer and mountain climber from Durango, Colorado. He’s the host of the weekly landscape photography podcast, “F-Stop Collaborate and Listen,” co-founder of the Nature First Photography Alliance, and co-founder of the Natural Landscape Photography Awards. He lives with his wife, Angela, his son Quinn, and his four cats, Juju, Chara, Arrow, and Vestal.
What does it mean to photograph something that could kill you? What kind of attention does it take to compose a frame when the subject is moving at highway speed, and the air around you is alive with rotation? And what does it say about photography as a practice that some photographers find their deepest creative clarity not in stillness, but in the controlled chaos of a supercell bearing down across the open plains?
Lauren Baca makes photographs that most landscape photographers will never attempt. Working across the storm corridors of the Great Plains, she chases and photographs severe weather: supercells, tornadoes, wall clouds, and the full theatrical experience of the American thunderstorm. But to describe her work simply as storm photography is to miss the point, in the same way that calling Ansel Adams a mountain photographer would miss the point. What Lauren is actually doing is landscape photography conducted at the extreme edge of the genre, where the landscape itself is volatile, where composition decisions happen in seconds, and where the light is generated not by the sun but by 60,000-foot columns of rotating atmosphere.
Her awesome images speak immediately to this. In one frame, a fully structured supercell hangs over the Kansas plains at golden hour, its layered inflow bands stacked and striated like geological strata, the whole system backlit by a warm amber glow that turns the surrounding wheat fields electric green. A ruined farmhouse sits at the base of the storm, tiny and still, the kind of detail that gives enormous scale to the sky above. In another, a tornado makes contact with red Oklahoma soil, the debris cloud billowing outward in warm tones against a churning gray-green sky: color that no photographer could plan for and that the plains produce almost casually during active chase days. These are not photographs of danger. They are photographs of order within disorder, of the atmosphere organizing itself according to its own precise and ancient logic. They are photographs that speak to Lauren’s inner voice.