Michael Kienitz has been a photographer for over forty years, his traditional photography has appeared in Life, Time, Newsweek, Elle, and the Rolling Stone as well as other similar publications worldwide. For ten years Kienitz has photographed many conflicts around the world yet recently he has shifted the focus of his photos from people to landscapes.

His exhibition titled „Iceland’s Vanishing Beauty“ which ran from September 13th through February 3, 2019, at the Chazen Art Museum at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In this exhibition, Kienitz showed his five-year work of collecting images from southeast Iceland of the ice caves and glacial formations from the region’s glacial tongues.

It all happened when Kienitz was visiting Iceland for the first time. He was on a guided tour to see the ice caves when the guide took out his phone to show him a gorgeous photo of an ice cave. The guide told him that two years ago, the glacier was right were Kienitz was standing. This is due to Iceland’s glacial ice melting, which is largely due to climate change. This is what inspired Kienitz to capture the landscape before it vanishes.

Kienitz uses his photography experience to capture this incredible landscape of active volcanoes, ice caves, beaches, canyons, waterfalls, wetlands, black sands, and mountains. Which have all been created through a complex combination of rivers, glacial ice, volcanic and geothermal activity.

Kienitz hopes that his exhibition will have a bigger impact on how people view climate change, through visuals rather than statistics.