Fierce Beauty

Eric Meola became interested in storms during a 1977 road trip across Nevada to photograph an album cover for musician Bruce Springsteen. While driving on a long dirt road in the desert they encountered a violent storm, and Springsteen wrote a song about the experience called 'The Promised Land'. Meola was transfixed as well by the display of nature's fury: "I always wanted to go back to that day when we drove up on a hilltop and watched as lightning revealed the valley floor."

Meola began to photograph the tornadic storms of the Great Plains - the area in America's heartland west of the 98th meridian and east of the Rockies. Driving through the area known as Tornado Alley - from the Rio Grande in southern Texas, north to the Canadian provinces of Alberta and Saskatchewan - he photographed a forbidding landscape where atmospheric instability collides with moisture from the Gulf of Mexico and spectacular cumulonimbus clouds form at twilight. Over a period of several years he documented a landscape of elemental forces, where immense storms percolate miles above the ground, rotating with energy until tornadoes spin on the horizon. And he discovered a country of haunting beauty where the wail of coyotes and the glow of constellations fill the prairie's void with simple graces. Fierce Beauty: Storms of the Great Plains includes more than one hundred photographs made during six seasons of tornadoes, lightning, dust storms, and storm phenomena, as well as a detailed and vivid description of a moment-by-moment close encounter with a cataclysmic tornado by renowned storm chaser and meteorologist William T. Reid.