These photos of amateur volcano hunting changed the way we look at natural disaster
Tempest Anderson chronicled our volatile planet
Before the professionalization of the arts and sciences, amateur dabbling could lead to great opportunity for gentlemen of the right background and persuasion. Take for instance the life of British ophthalmologic surgeon Tempest Anderson—an avid photographer who, bored with the humdrum of Victorian leisure time, pursued his love affair with geology to the ends of the earth, creating some of the earliest and most dramatic images of volcanoes and their aftermath in the process, and died doing so. But before meeting his end while crossing the Red Sea in 1913, Anderson spent the better part of his adulthood chasing lava flows—from France and Italy to South America, Hawaii, East Asia, and Iceland—becoming a respected vulcanologist and intrepid adventurer in the mold of, say, David Livingstone.
Anderson is credited as one of the earliest observers of pyroclastic flow—the quick-moving clouds of destructive volcanic matter that hurtle outward after an explosion and are often the cause of a volcano’s ground-level devastation. In the summer of 1902, he was commissioned by the Royal Society of London to visit the Caribbean islands of Martinique and St. Vincent, where the eruption of Mount Pelée and La Soufrière had claimed nearly 30,000 lives. Anderson’s colorful descriptions of what he saw include rivers of “boiling mud,” and an “incandescent avalanche” followed by “steam cauliflowers” rolling outward across the volcano’s slope.
Elsewhere, Anderson’s interests led him to investigations of all things geothermal, from Hawaiian calderas to the geysers of Yellowstone and back to the Caribbean, where he studied the way vegetation had returned to Mount Pelée in the years after its eruption. Anderson wasn’t only interested in the destruction wrought by volcanoes; he was inspired by a deep appreciation for the ways that a living, mutable earth adapts and rearranges itself through violent bursts of energy.
Anderson made his photographs on “quarter plate,” 4 ¼-inch by 3 ¼-inch negatives, which were a common format and thus widely available at the time. Upon returning to England, he would project his findings using a “magic lantern,” delivering presentations to the Yorkshire Philosophical Society, of which he was president. Despite the difficulty of traveling such distances at the time, and the encumbrance of his photographic equipment in very remote regions, Anderson was resolute that photography, more than illustration or mere description, was key to the advancement of empirical scientific research. “The manual artist,” he writes, “can at best only record what he has noticed; there may often be important points which have escaped his attention, though they would appear in a photograph; while in any case he can never hope to approach in accuracy the work of the lens.”
Photographs courtesy The Yorkshire Museum/York Museums Trust Tempest Anderson Photographic Archive.
