Red hot

One of the extraordinary things about leafing through the new picture book "The Red Volcanos -- Face to Face With the Mountains of Fire" is that it is focussed on two volcanoes only -- Hawaii's Kilauea and Piton de La Fournaise in the faraway Indian Ocean -- yet it's almost impossible to determine which image is from what volcano. Perhaps Pele has a twin sister.

The standardization of fast color film in the past century has allowed scientists and photographers to get up close to what is essentially a fluid event -- the earth cracked open and molten, in which the only constant is change. Older renditions of volcanoes focused on the stabilized destruction in their wake. It's only in the past century that humans have been able to share images of the churning geology.

It's a dangerous business. In addition to the terrible heat, the unstable landscape is littered with fragile lava tubes and knife-edged debris; the cooling magma expels toxic fumes; there are explosions of steam and hydrochloric acid when the lava reaches the sea. An irony -- as new land is built, life in the area is wiped out.

But photographers G. Brad Lewis and Paul-Edouard Bernard de Lajartre have found startling beauty in this blasted landscape, where birth is combined with death. The mixing of the images from volcanoes separated by thousands of miles reminds us also that we share this planet, even as it melts beneath our feet.