Chasing Time

Join us for a screening and discussion of the new documentary Chasing Time (2024) with A.D. White Professor-at-Large James Balog.

If a single photo can inspire change, how influential are a million images? Over the course of the 15-year Extreme Ice Survey project, photographer James Balog and his team brought some of the world’s first and most compelling visual evidence of climate change to the global stage as he depicted the rapid melting of glaciers around the world.

Thoughtfully helmed by acclaimed director Jeff Orlowski-Yang and first-time filmmaker Sarah Keo, Chasing Time is a meditative exploration of time and mortality, following James and his crew as they bring the decades-long project to a close, cataloging more than one million images in the process. This short documentary reunites James and the Emmy-award-winning team behind Chasing Ice to capture the end of the epic undertaking and spotlight the power of an intergenerational effort to seed hope and inspire action toward a sustainable future. A beautiful tribute to the power of images and the importance of mentorship, the team examines the legacy their efforts have made on the world.

Free admission and free concessions! Sponsored by the A.D. White Professor-at-Large Program and cosponsored by the College Scholar Program and the Department of Communications

Part of our "Campus Collaborations" series. Courtesy of Exposure Labs.

About the speaker
James Balog is the Founder of the Extreme Ice Survey and Earth Vision Institute. For 40 years, as a photographer, Balog has broken new conceptual and artistic ground on one of the most important issues of our era: human modification of nature. An avid mountaineer with a graduate degree in geography and geomorphology, Balog is equally at home on a Himalayan peak or a whitewater river, the African savannah, or polar icecaps. His 2018 film The Human Element is an innovative look at the intersection of humanity and the rest of nature. It has received numerous awards and been screened worldwide.

To reveal the impact of climate change, Balog founded the Extreme Ice Survey (EIS) in 2007. It is the most wide-ranging, ground-based, photographic study of glaciers ever conducted. The project was featured in the internationally acclaimed documentary Chasing Ice and in the 2009 PBS/NOVA special Extreme Ice. Chasing Ice won an Emmy in 2014 and was shortlisted for the Academy Awards. It has been screened at the White House, U.S. Congress, Great Britain’s House of Commons, the United Nations, and major international science and policy conferences, including COP-15 in Copenhagen and COP-21 in Paris. Balog is also the author of eight books. His images have been collected in dozens of public and private art collections—and extensively published in the world’s magazines, particularly National Geographic.