When Christopher Columbus first saw manatees, he thought they were mermaids. He dreamed of taking shelter on their tail flukes.
—Gregory Colbert
On the bottom of the sea the sand ripples like the dunes of the desert and I knew that my next journey would take me to those vast arid seas.
—Gregory Colbert
An elephant with his trunk raised is a ladder to the stars.
A breaching whale is a ladder to the bottom of the sea.
My photographs are a ladder to my dreams.
—Gregory Colbert
The Ashes and Snow installation at the Nomadic Museum in Mexico City included, for the first time, water canals over which the photographic artworks were suspended.
The whales do not sing because they have an answer. They sing because they have a song.
—Gregory Colbert
In the presence of the whales, a childhood memory returned to me. On my last day of primary school, the teacher had my entire class lie down end to end on the floor of the gymnasium. “Together,” she said, “you are still shorter than the longest blue whale.”
I was humbled and confused, yet full of wonder. I told myself that when I grew taller, I would explore the mystery of the whales. I am taller now, but I still feel no closer to understanding the mystery of the whales.
Perhaps I misunderstood the lesson that the whales and my teacher were trying to give me—that you embrace wonder, that you feel wonder without ever really understanding it.
—Gregory Colbert
As I dove, a pod of whales gathered around me. Warm shafts of sunlight streamed down as if through stained glass. The whales scissored the water with their pectoral fins and cocooned my body in air bubbles. They fanned and rolled me in their tail flukes. I felt as if I were falling weightlessly upward.
I could feel the rhythms of the sea.
—Gregory Colbert
After my time with the elephants, I went to the ocean and swam out beyond the coral reefs, where the open sea becomes so deep and so vast that the blueness beneath the surface looks like a second sky.
—Gregory Colbert
Gregory’s images return us to the sanity of our undeniable, unavoidable, inextricable connection to nature. And they do it with beauty, grace, lightness-of-being, strength. His images, like whale songs, are the last wild voices calling to the consciousness of terminally civilized humanity, our last contact with nature before we submerge forever in our own manufacture and lose forever the final fragments of our wild selves.
—Roger Payne
Roger Payne is the world’s preeminent whale biologist. He is famous for the discovery, with Scott McVay, of whale song among Humpback whales. In 2010 he joined Gregory Colbert on a filming expedition in Antarctica.
Gregory Colbert will be on continuous filming expeditions in the Caribbean Sea, Africa, and points north for the next two months. While he is away team Colbert will resume sharing the story of Ashes and Snow and its migrations. And as May is a prime month for observing whales in most oceans on the planet, we will be featuring a selection of Gregory’s encounters with this magnificent mammal over the next several weeks.
What if all the cranes in the world closed their eyes at the same time and made a wish? What would it be?
—Gregory Colbert
David Attenborough taught us more than any other filmmaker about the mysteries of animal behavior. He showed us that we are not alone as a species, and that our lives are richer when we realize that we have not only a human pulse in our veins, but the pulse of all the other living species with whom we share the earth.
—Gregory Colbert
Thank you for following us on Tumblr. We invite you to join us as Gregory launches his new official YouTube channel; (http://www.youtube.com/gregorycolbert) where Gregory will be sharing his latest videos as he continues his visual journey.
