Last Updated on 10/27/2018 by Mark Beckenbach
All images by Tom Hagen. Used with Creative Commons Permission.
Some of the best things in photography are metaphors that spur imaginative thought and add a sense of creativity beyond just simple capture. That’s what Tam Hagen’s The River Veins does for us. Tom, who created the series using a Canon 5D Mk IV, is the man behind the series that is making us think more, not only about how it was exactly done but also about the many implications behind the series.
According to Tom’s description:
“As the glaciers in Iceland melt, ice blue water veins their way across black volcanic sand, creating most peculiar patterns in the landscape. Those scenes have an element of duality – it is hard to tell whether a picture was taken from a macro perspective or from a small airplane around 3000 feet in the air.”
So what does that mean? Maybe these images were created in a Macro world or maybe they were shot from really high above. We don’t really know, but the series still is gorgeous and brings to mind all of what’s happening with global warming and its effects. Upon first look (and I’m not peaking at the EXIF data) I was convinced that some of these are exaggerated long exposures, carefully done in a studio of some sort. Indeed, shooting these images out of an airplane would be very difficult to do unless it was private. However, if you look at the tags and keywords on Behance, you’ll see that this is aerial photography–so Tom indeed did do these images from the air. It’s a wonder that our world is able to give us sights like these.
Artistically speaking, the images give lots of variety in the way the vein structures look. When looking at the images, you don’t necessarily think that all of them resemble the vein structures we’re used to seeing in the human body. Some of these could be the veins as they appear in plants. For example, have you ever looked at a maple leaf being held up to the sun and observed the structure? Or it could be prenatal vein structures.
If you’re into poetry, it calls to mind many of the poems by the great American poet William Carlos Williams; a doctor who often alluded to the seasons as the cycle of birth and death. In some ways, we can see the spirit of Williams visualized in Tom’s project.
Be sure to check out the rest of the project over at Tom’s Behance place.