“They have a little magnesium in there, and they go
‘poof,’” Peter explains. “They burn out in one flash.”
Each of his shots had to be repeated several times
as he adjusted the lights, accounting for the climbers turning the bulbs in the wrong direction and for
the clouds of mist moving through the humid, dank
caverns. Hence the need to carry hundreds of bulbs
to the cave’s remote location.
Despite all the obstacles, Peter’s strategy
worked. His dramatic images of the cavern’s lakes
and stalagmites, published last year in National
Geographic, earned Peter his second award from
the prestigious World Press Photo competition. He
won his previous World Press Photo prize in 2004,
for his images of tornadoes in the American south
and west.
Peter has made his reputation by exploring remote and sometimes dangerous places in a variety
of ways—rappelling into active volcanoes, deep-sea diving, climbing through glaciers, outracing tornadoes—and by employing ingenious techniques
and customized gear in order to meet the technical challenges he finds in each location. When, for
example, the enormous crystals in a cave under
Mexico’s Chihuahuan desert interfered with optical triggers on his strobes, he customized his own
radio slaves to trigger multiple strobes around the
cave interiors. Inside a volcano in the Democratic
Republic of Congo, he used lightpainting and long
exposures to capture the dark walls of the crater. “I
make special constructions, if necessary. Everything
that’s necessary for the shoot, I’ll do it,” Peter says.
Though he does careful research in advance in order to anticipate problems, he often has to make
quick decisions, and come up with solutions on the
fly. “There’s a lot of improvisation involved, because
things turn out completely differently than you’d
expect. When you’re down there in a volcano crater, you can be faced with something unexpected.”
His obsession with exploration seems inspired
by equal parts scientific curiosity and childlike wonder. The German-born Peter studied biology in college. During breaks between semesters, he would
travel around Africa by motorcycle, always bringing
along a camera. “Photography for me was a tool to
show others interesting parts of the world that are
difficult to reach.” He taught himself photography
by reading a book, and then doing everything the
book said not to do. “If they said you can’t photograph into the sun, I photographed into the sun,” he
says. “It’s interesting to me to approach it in a different way.” Sales of his photos helped him finance
his studies and his travels.
His fascination with nature’s wonders dates
back even earlier. As a 15-year-old, he was thrilled to
join his parents on a trip to Mount Etna, the active
Opposite page, inset: Carsten Peter, climber, caver,
photographer. Bottom: Mount Etna, Sicily, photographed in
2001. This page: An image from an expedition to what may
be the world’s biggest subterranean passages in Phong Nha
Ke Bang National Park, Vietnam.
