Elemental draws the viewer into the primordial landscapes of Iceland and Patagonia, where the earth still reveals its volcanic and glacial origins with raw immediacy.
These terrains, vast and untamed, radiate a fierce beauty that can be, at times, both restorative and menacing. They embrace and resist us at once, offering moments of solace while reminding us that nature endures beyond our understanding.
Through long exposures, wind and water become fluid gestures flowing across mountains and ice fields scarred by deep time. Motion and stillness merge; the fleeting and the enduring meet in a landscape alive with contradiction. Shadow becomes grace, the sublime conceals disquiet, and the sacred arises from mystery.
Rendered in monochrome, the images strip away the seductions of color to reveal form, texture, and light in their purest expression. Basalt cliffs appear as fractured cathedrals; glaciers unfold as frozen histories; grasses bend like whispers against stone. Each photograph becomes a meditation on the delicate balance between permanence and impermanence, beauty and desolation, faith and uncertainty.
Ultimately, Elemental is a search for meaning within the silence of the natural world. These landscapes, both sacred and indifferent, reflect the human impulse to seek beauty in shadow, solace in uncertainty, and humility before forces far greater than ourselves. The series invites viewers to look beyond depiction and enter into reverence: to experience nature not as a backdrop, but as a vast, enduring presence in which we are ephemeral participants.
In Elemental, Lev L. Spiro approaches nature not as a passive landscape but as a living force—an expression of energy, balance, and transformation. Created during his travels through Iceland, Patagonia, and other regions where the planet’s primordial power remains visible, the series becomes an intimate dialogue between the photographer and the elements themselves.
Spiro’s compositions are spare, meditative, and often on the edge of abstraction. His lens isolates light, vapor, and texture to capture not the image of a place, but its essence—the breath of the earth. Fire cools into stone, air merges with water, and light weaves through the contours of rock as if painting its own language.
Each photograph holds a suspended stillness, born of the artist’s cinematic discipline. Spiro frames the natural world with the timing and emotional precision of a director, transforming physical landscapes into visual metaphors for endurance and impermanence.
Elemental is not a record of geography but a study of belonging—a meditation on the forces that form us and the beauty that emerges when we recognize ourselves as part of the same timeless matter.
Curatorial Note:
Through its quiet strength and poetic restraint, Elemental embodies Spiro’s belief that photography can be an act of reverence—a return to origins, where the viewer feels both humbled and renewed in the presence of the natural world.
About Lev L. Spiro
Lev L. Spiro is an American fine art photographer and accomplished film and television director whose visual language bridges the immediacy of cinema with the meditative stillness of photography. His current artistic focus explores the natural world as a place of emotional resonance and spiritual reflection, a vision embodied in his recent photographic series Elemental and Thin Places.
Spiro’s journey into fine art photography grew naturally from a distinguished career directing more than 160 productions for film and television. His work on acclaimed series such as Orange Is the New Black, Ugly Betty, Modern Family, and Weeds refined his understanding of light, atmosphere, and the poetic potential of visual storytelling. This cinematic discipline, the ability to distill mood, gesture, and transformation into a single frame, now informs every aspect of his photographic practice.
In his photography, Spiro seeks what he describes as “the invisible conversation between light and matter.” His camera turns toward elemental forms, earth, air, water, and fire, and toward the fragile boundaries between the tangible and the transcendent. In Elemental, he captures the raw dialogue of natural forces; in Thin Places, he searches for spiritual thresholds where the physical world seems to open into silence and awe.
Spiro’s photographs have been widely exhibited across the United States and internationally, including galleries such as A. Smith Gallery, PH21 Gallery, and the Southeast Center for Photography. His work has been published in Dodho, Shadow & Light, Art Ascent, AAP, and Black & White Magazine.
He lives and works in Los Angeles, California, where he continues to teach and create, shaping a body of work defined by clarity, reverence, and the enduring mystery of light. [Official Website]
