I was right in the middle of a Harry Potter movie, I remember thinking! It was so strange.
— Brenda Tharp, Substack
Some people hunt storms, calling themselves storm chasers, or just chasers—borrowing the American term. Chasers drive boldly toward disaster, sandwich in their bag, camera around their neck. Natural disasters don’t wait.
Chasers say things like: About fifty percent of our chases pan out. It’s that element of competition, the investment it demands, that gives the thrill. (Paul and Gijs, ANWB website)
Gijs and Paul’s ‘investment’ pays off, in the end, into a catch, a harvest, a prize: a photograph. Brenda Tharp sees no harm in capitalizing on light: It’s not always about being hailed or rained on, or standing with a conductive tripod in a storm. It’s about capitalizing on the dramatic light that storms and atmospheric conditions can provide.
This can be done with a different intention. Writer John Muir was once overtaken by a storm, being not the hunter, but the hunted. Yet he, too, returned with a prize—a truly beautiful one: his 1894 essay A Wind-Storm in the Forests, a text that rages around the reader’s head.
The sounds of the storm corresponded gloriously with this wild exuberance of light and motion. The profound bass of the naked branches and boles blooming like waterfalls; the quick, tense vibration of the pine-needles, now rising to a shrill, whistling hiss, now falling to a silky murmur; the rustling of laurel groves in the dells, and the keen metallic click of leaf on leaf—all this was heard in easy analysis when the attention was calmly bent.
MOHA too captures beauty from the storm. The Library for Strategies of Surviving the Storm will be on display all month in the Bijlmer, on: May 1, 4, 6, 7, 11, 13, 15, 18, 20, 21, 27, 28, and 29 to be precise.