Balog’s interest in nature originated in his early childhood. His fascination with wild places has affected everything he has done, including sports, exploration, the study of geology and his eventual career as an image creator.

While working on his undergraduate degree at Boston College, Balog became an avid adventurer. He made frequent trips to the White Mountains of New Hampshire and the wilderness rivers of Maine, and would later graduate to larger climbing expeditions in the Alps and Himalayas, not to mention first ascents in Alaska.

As his outdoor adventures evolved, Balog increasingly felt a need to document his experiences. He began carrying a camera on his trips and teaching himself photography along the way. While working on a master’s degree in geomorphology at the University of Colorado, he honed his photography skills during frequent climbing trips.

As the completion of his geomorphology degree neared, Balog became disenchanted with the extensive amounts of statistical analysis and computer modeling required by the field. Yearning for a more direct, hands-on connection with the natural world, he decided to abandon work as a scientist and pursue a life in nature photojournalism. He began with a series of documentary photography assignments for various magazines, work he continues today. Later, he would move into self-directed projects, many of which would ultimately lead to large format photography books. Over the years, Balog has tackled topics such as big-game hunting, endangered species and North America’s old-growth forests.

Largely self-taught in photography, Balog’s formal training in image creation consists of two workshops, one with color photo pioneer and one-time Magnum photographer Ernst Haas and another with noted documentary photographer Eugene Richards. Balog’s work has primarily evolved as a combination of art, science and environmental documentary. Today, he views his imagery as exploring the “contact zone” between man and nature.

Among his many artistic influences, Balog counts Irving Penn, Richard Avedon, Carleton Watkins, William Henry Jackson, Edward Weston, Robert Adams, Lewis Baltz, Eliot Porter and Ansel Adams. Outside of photography, he draws inspiration from the entire range of arts, including music, literature, painting, filmmaking, sculpture and architecture.

Balog has been working in professional photography for more than 25 years. His work has appeared in National Geographic, The New Yorker, Life, Vanity Fair, The New York Times Magazine, Smithsonian, Audubon, Outside and numerous trade publications, such as American Photo, Professional Photographer and Photo District News. He is a contributing editor to National Geographic Adventure and is the subject of the short film "A Redwood Grows in Brooklyn". Assignments have included documenting the aftermath of the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens, the 2004 tsunami that devastated Southeast Asia, and Hurricane Katrina’s collision with the American Gulf Coast.

Balog has produced six books: Wildlife Requiem, Survivors: A New Vision of Endangered Wildlife, Anima, James Balog’s Animals A to Z, Animal, Tree: A New Vision of the American Forest, and Extreme Ice, Vanishing Glaciers and Changing Climate: A Progress Report. While all of the titles received favorable critical responses, Survivors and Tree were particularly hailed as major conceptual breakthroughs in nature photography.

Balog’s most recent undertaking is the Extreme Ice Survey. Founded in December 2006, the project uses time-lapse photography, conventional photography and video to illustrate the effects of global warming on the earth’s glacial ice. Working with a team of scientists, videographers and extreme-weather expedition professionals, Balog and the EIS team installed 27 time-lapse camera systems at 18 locations in Greenland, Iceland, Alaska, the Rocky Mountains and British Columbia. The cameras are programmed to photograph once an hour, every hour of daylight. The Extreme Ice Survey team then assembles the images into video animations that demonstrate the dramatic retreat of the glaciers. In addition, a dozen positions have been established for annual repeat photography in Iceland, the Alps and Bolivia. Collected images will be used for scientific evidence and as part of a global outreach campaign aimed at educating the public about the effects of global warming.

“I’ve basically devoted my career to looking at the relationship between humans and nature, and to looking at nature,” said Balog in an interview with Photo District News. “To me, that’s the core of my mission, and it has been and it will be until I pass out of this world. I want to do what I can to shift human understanding of who we are and what we are and how we should relate to all the rest of what’s on this planet. I want to crack through the veneer of the illusions that surround us and see inside reality more purely than you normally get to see. That’s the real witchcraft and voodoo of this artistic process we’re in. I hope that the work helps people to think and see differently...and ultimately, we can only hope, behave differently.”

The theme of man’s relationship with nature continues in Balog’s ongoing work with the Extreme Ice Survey. Through his efforts on this project and other work dealing with the environment, Balog has dedicated himself to using art to raise awareness of how humans affect their natural surroundings. As he has stated in numerous interviews, Balog views photography as a form of visual evidence that carries tremendous potential for influencing people’s perception of the world around them. “I’ve believed for a long time that photographers are like the antennae of civilization,” he said in a Professional Photographer magazine article. “We are an integral part of the sensing mechanism of the human animal. We are out there feeling in the darkness, trying to see what’s around us and reveal what hasn’t been revealed before. Not all photographers work that way, but to me that’s one of the central elements of photography. I would like to think that passionate, involved photographers would be looking at the world and trying their hardest to speak about the important things that are going on today.”

Balog’s artistic style varies between very clean, simple representations of his subjects and more impressionistic interpretations that illustrate his unconscious feelings about a scene. He tends to alter his treatments and techniques based on emotional responses to a subject and the circumstances surrounding his shooting.

Early in his career, Balog went through a period where he concentrated on man’s direct impact on nature. He produced a series on nuclear missile silos in the agrarian landscapes of the American West. He created numerous manmade landscape pictures. In Balog’s first book project, he examined the phenomenon of people killing animals for sport. Published in 1984, Wildlife Requiem shocked the photography establishment with its brutally graphic images.

“In a lot of my work I’m trying to make a commentary about humans encroaching on nature through their presence,” said Balog in an interview with Photo District News. “But I’m not so naïve as to think that my own presence is not an impact on the animals and plants and landscapes that I happen to enter. What I can do as a photographer, hopefully, is to help everybody else see their impact in a way that maybe they hadn’t before.”

ANIMA series. Seeking to challenge humankind’s ancient cultural perception about its place in the world, Balog paired chimpanzees with a diverse range of humans and photographed a series of provocative portraits. The conceptual artwork draws on insights from a variety of fields, including visual arts, environmental philosophy and Jungian psychology. ANIMA asks readers to imagine a healthier, more integrated relationship between humans and nature.

Extreme Ice Survey. Undoubtedly Balog’s most ambitious project, the Extreme Ice Survey combines scientists, artists and explorers in a multi-year undertaking that will ultimately generate more than 400,000 images of retreating glaciers. Balog and his team installed 27 time-lapse camera systems at 18 glaciers in Greenland, Iceland, Alaska, the Rocky Mountains and British Columbia, as well as a dozen positions for annual repeat photography in Iceland, the Alps and Bolivia. The cameras photograph once an hour, every hour of daylight, for three years. The ultimate collection of images and video animations will be used to demonstrate the catastrophic effect of global warming on the earth’s glacial regions. It is the most wide-ranging glacier study ever conducted using ground-based, real-time photography.

Holga series. Starting in 1997 and continuing intermittently through the present day, Balog has continued a series of photographs made with a Holga camera. Holgas are inexpensive, medium-format 120 film toy cameras that are made in China and appreciated for a low-fidelity aesthetic. Balog enjoys working with the imperfections in the exposures, such as vignetting and blur, and makes them part of the pieces. He actually wants the camera to produce little defects that will inspire new creative revelations.

Survivors series. Balog endeavored to change people’s perception of endangered wildlife by altering the context in which the animals were viewed. To accomplish this, he shunned the obvious approach of capturing his subjects in nature with a telephoto lens and instead photographed the animals in non-natural settings, often against white backdrops, to emphasize their vulnerability.

Techno Sapiens series. Balog explored the concept of Homo sapiens becoming increasingly dependent on technology in his conceptual series “Techno Sapiens”. The portfolio includes images that range from techno-fashion portraits to photographs depicting people's techno-habitats. Balog used a variety of techniques to create images that illustrate the changing features of human nature, as well as humankind's increasing detachment from the natural world. The duality of the pictures, a tension between beauty and horror, mimics the ambivalence most people feel for technology.

Tree series. For the Tree series, Balog wanted to photograph some of world’s tallest trees in their full grandeur, but he realized that his subjects were far too large to capture in a single frame. So he devised a multi-frame approach of photographing the trees from the top down. The method was inspired by some of the lunar landing pictures from the NASA missions during the 1960s. Balog would climb each tree, and then meticulously photograph them in sections as he rappelled downward. Later, he would create digital mosaics by stitching the images together using computer imaging software. Some images required up to three days of shooting, plus as many as six weeks of computer work to reassemble the final composition. The tree images eventually became a 2004 book release.