Articles & Interviews

Playing With Fire / PDN / Exposures
February, 2002

by Jane Gottlieb

When the volcano came to take the town of Kalapana in 1989, G. Brad Lewis shot a photo looking across the lava flow at the crowd of people whose homes were about to be extinguished in its path. “It was a sad event for most people because Kalapana was such a beautiful place, a home to people for generations,” says Lewis, 43, from his Hawaiian home
just a few miles from there. “But it’s also viewed as Pele the fire goddess, and the people say, ‘She can have it because it’s her land.’ It’s a whole different attitude than if this was the mainland and a natural disaster.”

With that shot, he caught what was about to happen coupled with the emotions of the people who would face the consequences. It was the first photograph Lewis had ever sold as a professional. It landed a two-page spread in LIFE. Time came next, along with dozens of other publications. Lewis has been following the journey of the Kilauea volcano ever since.

Hawaii’s youngest, most active volcano, Kilauea (which began erupting 19 years ago) makes its presence known with the magma that spews from a fissure in the ground along with the cones it pushes up before boiling over like a blast furnace. Lewis is there with his cameras and tripods for those moments which burn his face red and melt his boots. He is
there when lava hits the ocean, throwing steam into the sky.

Lewis is also there when the cones have collapsed into craters and the lava hardens to continue the process of growing the earth, and when ferns take root in the raw lava. His volcano photographs do not show a single event or place; rather they follow a lengthy process. “What I photograph will evoke an emotional moment. Something moves me. I get a lot of feedback on that emotional response,” he says between Kilauea sightings. “This is creation. I’m capturing magical moments of destruction and then creation.”

So closely has his career paralleled that of the seismic event that Lewis’s moniker, like his Web site’s, is “volcano man.” His outdoor photos, with an emphasis on Hawaiian volcanoes, sell briskly at stock agencies and have made the covers of LIFE, Natural History, and GEO while also appearing in National Geographic and Outside. In
addition, he earns his living selling his prints which appear in exhibits and books.

To understand his work, it is important to know that the volcanoes that formed and are still forming the Hawaiian islands are not of the Mount St. Helen’s variety which burst suddenly like a balloon, fill the sky with ash and leave a lot of people dead. “This is a continual
eruption. We know where the event is and when a new event happens,” Lewis explains.

Typically, scientists studying Kilauea contact him with reports of activity. Loaded down with a tent, a Nikon, a Pentax, a host of lenses, protective gear and a bottle of wine for later, he hires a helicopter to get to the spot. He stays an afternoon or a week. He might need to wait for the best light or act fast because in 20 minutes an orange fire can become a black surface.

He sets up as close as is safe with two cameras on tripods. Lewis uses 6 x 7 format set for 30-second exposures, slow enough to give the feel of motion. The cameras are timed to go off intermittently. If the wind shifts and sends lava his way, he runs and leaves the cameras to do the job. “I’ve had situations where everything looked good and I had an uneasy feeling that I needed to leave, and I turned around five minutes later to find the spot where I was standing had exploded,” he says.

He sacrifices up to five cameras a year to the mission. Usually, the electronics get fried and the lens gets pitted by the acid filling the air. Casualties also include his photo vests which melt like tissue paper. He wears boots that are stitched, not glued, but still goes through numerous pairs. Lewis wears a respirator in the field but not fireproof gear because he wants to know about sudden temperature rises so he can move. He has never been hurt and feels so secure in the field that he sometimes takes his six-year-old daughter Heather to his
“office.”

Still, in addition to fire bursts, Lewis has to watch for the delicate shelf of new land formed by the hardening lava that can collapse under his feet. Once, he became stranded overnight when a stream of lava unexpectedly surfaced and left him unable to get back to his car.

Lewis shoots largely on speculation and almost never works on something that doesn’t interest him. He follows a simple formula of doing what he enjoys. He has no training in photography. He has made up for it with a knowledge of geology and an intuition that leads him to seek beauty.

A Utah native, the photographer has let nature lead him from the West to Alaska and now Hawaii where someday Kilauea may claim his own home. “I’ve put 20 years of work into my home and garden, but people here are not so attached,” he explains. “We do live on the world’s most active volcano.