Articles & Interviews

Photographic Magazine - Pro Profiles

Brad Lewis

They call him “Volcano Man.” 17 years ago he was 25 and making ends meet as a finishing carpenter on the island of Hawaii. But his passion was photography. It had been since he was seven or eight and found a Brownie camera under the Christmas tree. He was living with his family then at the base of the Wasatch Mountians. The mountains and desert were his subjects.

Eventually he went to the University of Utah but “bailed” in his last quarter before graduating because he was afraid of becoming “a citizen” -- “You know, graduate, get a job,” says the Volcano Man himself, Brad Lewis. “I had this fear of falling into the rut of working and not getting away and really experiencing true adventure.”

He headed for Alaska, which he judged one of the last places in America you could find true adventure, and promptly got a job at a jade mine in the Brooks Range -- one of the most remote areas of that remote state. He kept the diamond-studded jade saws gassed up, kept the bears away, and in between panned for gold and built a cabin on a small homestead. “And of course I was taking a lot of photos, because the beauty was amazing.”

In the back of his mind, always, was the wish to combine his love of nature with his love of photography. When he became an archeologist for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, he took a small step. His job was to document historical and cemetery sites, and he did it in part by taking photographs, often aerials lensed while hanging out of a two-seater.

“I was 23 or 24 and having a ball up there,” Lewis confesses. “And then I went to Hawaii for a two week vacation -- and never left.” The tropical landscape, the climate, the clear light -- for a visually oriented person, it was an impossible act to follow. And, of course, there were the volcanoes. Moving lava. “Liquid light,” as Lewis thinks of it.

By this time he’d amassed a pretty good volume of images -- from Alaska, side-trips to Europe and the South Pacific, and then from Hawaii. He started sending portfolios to the kind of magazines he wanted to be in. A number of the dupes were of a small lava flow near the town of Kalapana.

“And then the flow went right into Kalapana,” remembers Lewis, “and suddenly the magazines started calling. And so my second published photo ever was this double page in Life magazine. At the same time, they were putting a geothermal development in a rainforest in Hawaii, and it became quite a controversy. And so almost at the same time, in 1990, I had a double page in Time magazine of a huge crowd of protesters in the rain forest. Overnight, agents started contacting me. I felt very fortunate that I had these great subjects which totally kick-started my whole career.”

Not that shooting out on the lava flows didn’t have its problems. The acid fumes, he discovered, got into any little crack in a camera, corroding the interior mechanisms and precipitating electronic failure. The one camera he finally found “robust” enough to stand up to the punishment was the Pentax 67. “Plus, I love the format, being that much
larger,” says Lewis, now married with a young daughter. Two years ago when Pentax came out with its redesign of the 67, Lewis upgraded and found even more reasons to like the camera. He does a lot of time-lapse night photography, and so frequently uses the 67 II’s
ability to keep the shutter open, indefinitely, without draining the battery. An LCD data panel gives him all the information he needs to check at a glance. And the camera’s light meter remains as accurate as always. “When I’m at the lava flow, conditions are changing so much from second to second, the brightness and intensity, I’ve got to go with what the camera says. And with the 67, I’ve never had to bracket my images.”

Even after a decade of shooting volcanoes, Lewis insists he is never bored. And he finds images of erupting lava grab other people’s emotions as well -- reminding them that the earth is alive.