Camille Seaman Discusses 'Melting Away'

Camille Seaman will discuss and sign her new book, Melting Away: A Ten-Year Journey Through Our Endangered Polar Regions. Joining her in conversation will be Richard Whittaker.

As an expedition photographer aboard small ships in the Arctic and Antarctic, Camille Seaman has chronicled the accelerating effects of global warming on the jagged faces of nearly fifty thousand icebergs. Seaman's unique perspective of the landscape is entwined with her Native American upbringing: each responds to its environment uniquely, almost as if they were living beings. Melting Away collects seventy-five of Seaman's most captivating photographs, lifeaffirming images that reveal not only what we have already lost, but more importantly what we still have that is worth fighting to save.

Camille Seaman was born in 1969 to a Native American (Shinnecock tribe) father and African American mother. She graduated in 1992 from the State University of New York at Purchase. Her photographs have been published in National Geographic Magazine, Italian Geo, The New York Times Sunday Magazine, Newsweek, Time, Outside, Zeit Wissen, Men's Journal, Camera Arts, German Geo among many others. Camille Seaman lives in Emeryville, California, and takes photographs all over the world using digital and film cameras in multiple formats. She works in a documentary/fine art tradition. She lectures globally about her work and experiences.

Richard Whittaker is the co-founder, with Rue Harrison, of the non-profit Society for the ReCognition of Art and founding editor of the magazine works & conversations. He is also the West Coast editor of Parabola magazine. Although Whittaker has a background in philosophy and clinical psychology and has done graduate work at the GTU in Berkeley, his connections with art go back over forty years including photography, ceramics, painting and sculpture.