Photography: Mitch Dobrowner pictures of storms are a terrifying ode to the power of nature

If you’ll allow me to get a bit literary on yo’ asses for a second, Mitch Dobrowner’s utterly spellbinding photographs of storms bring to mind Alexander Pope’s 1734 poem An Essay to Man. In bombastic couplets, Pope rails against what he saw as the arrogant philosophical questioning of the world around us, and warns that God and his plans are unknowable. Mitch’s work feels like a visual exploration of the same ideas; terrifying photographs of storms that could have come straight from a admonitory Renaissance painting.

Capturing these raging, chaotic, noisy natural phenomena in a single still paradoxically heighten their power; the devastating, incomprehensible beauty of nature at its most destructive is almost overwhelming. Unlike Pope, Mitch isn’t making a point about the divine, rather he is celebrating the natural world on its own terms. In his statement he said: “Landscapes are living eco systems and environments. They have existed well before, and will hopefully be here way beyond the time we are here.”

Storms is on display at the Kopelkin Gallery in Los Angeles from September 7 until October 26.