Helmut Völter , WOLKENSTUDIEN. CLOUD STUDIES. ÉTUDES DES NUAGES., 2016

Clouds are fleeting entities – studying them so as to correctly classify, name and read their forms was considered in the 19th and early 20th centuries an important step in coming to understand the secrets of the atmosphere. In its early stages photography offered scientists completely new ways of depicting clouds. They used cameras to make precise, lifelike images, which provided in turn insights into the interaction of clouds and the atmosphere. Helmut Völter‘s »Cloud Studies« presents six different stations of scientific cloud photography, from its beginnings in the 1880s to the images made by the first weather satellites in the 1960s. Each of the six chapters represents a very different scientific and photographic perspective of clouds.

With an essay by Marcel Beyer; photographs by Albert Riggenbach, Ralph Abercromby, anonymous pilots of World War I, Ferdinand Quénisset, Philippe Schereschewsky, Philippe Wehrlé, Masanao Abe and the Tiros weather satellites; and excerpts from works by Jean Baptiste Lamarck, Luke Howard, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, John Ruskin, Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Clement Ley and others.