Kevin Erskine. Supercell: Kevin Erskine (E) - Hardcover

Erskine's panoramic images capture the fierce overwhelming beauty of supercell thunderstorms in striking color. Recording these spectacular storms, the images are always framed with just enough of the earth visible to ground the viewer and - when combined with the scale of the prints (and now the oversized book from Hatje Cantz) - articulate the feeling of being dwarfed by the overwhelming force of nature.--Sarah Bradley "Photo-Eye Blog " To illustrate Nate Silver's recent article on the state of weather forecasting, we turned to the work of the storm photographer Kevin Erskine, whose haunting pictures of atmospheric disturbances are the subject of his book "Supercell," which came out last year. "Erskine" is the professional pseudonym used by Erik Hijweege, a Dutch photographer who was inspired to combine his longstanding interests in storms and landscape photography when he visited the United States seven years ago and met the meteorologist and well-known storm chaser Tim Marshall. Hijweege, known for his portraiture and commercial work in the Netherlands, decided he needed an alter ego when he was escaping from his everyday life and pursuing extreme weather, so he came up with "Kevin Erskine." In his mind, Erskine is farmer -- someone close to nature -- from Valentine, Neb., a town Hijweege fell in love with on one of his trips through what's known as Tornado Alley.--Marvin Orellana "The New York Times Magazine " Nebraskan photographer Kevin Erskine captures epic doings in the skies over the Great Plains, where layers of cool and warm, dry and humid air clash to create tornadoes, lightning, and, if conditions are right, an especially combustible tempest called the supercell - a massive swirling thunderstorm whose powerful updrafts often precede twisters. A longtime "storm chaser," he has produced a catalogue of atmospheric sculptures whose monikers - wall cloud, mammatus, inflow band, mothership - evoke, as do the images themselves, both the primal and the futuristic. Of course, the imminent doom isn't merely figurative, as the volume's very last photo makes clear: Spread over two pages are the splintered, gnarled remains of homes and trees where a tornado touched down in Greensburg, Kansas, in 2007.--Alberto Mobilo "Bookforum "

At the age of twelve, Kevin Erskine (*1956 in Sharpsburg, Illinois) witnessed his first big storm: a category 4 tornado with wind speeds of over 207 miles per hour raged through the center of his hometown of Hoskins, Nebraska. Fascinated and inspired by this immense force of nature, Erskine began taking his first photographs with his father’s camera. His passion for photography and respect for nature still motivate him to capture supercells with his large-format camera. The images depict enormous cloud masses in continually different formations―be it before a thunderstorm, during a tornado, shined on by the red evening sun, or forebodingly dark purple or black by night. Erskine masterfully demonstrates the ambivalence between the terrifying force of nature and its stunning beauty.