Photo by Bryant Austin

Photography can show us new angles of the worlds we live in, but it can also show us ones we never knew existed. That’s the effort behind photographer Bryant Austin’s life work: to document the beautiful world of whales and to show us what we may soon be missing.

In the new short film In the Eye of the Whale, which debuted at the Ocean Film Fest 2010 in San Francisco, Austin’s work on the endangered species is documented in all its moving detail. The film follows Austin’s incredible effort to create life-size, high-definition images of the creatures by combining thousands of individual close-up photographs.

Austin, who at “great personal expense” has spent the majority of his career documenting whales, hopes to show the giant pictures in countries where whaling is prevalent. Perhaps this will help convince people of the species’ sublime beauty, and curtail their ongoing destruction.

The pivotal impact I seek is to upset the abstractness of whales; my aim is to make them real. In popular media we experience whales through small photographs and brief video clips which fail to convey their existence in anything more than an infrequent, pale, and abstract way. My goal is to present their true size with all of the intricate detail and texture revealed, providing an immediacy and sensorial reality for powerful psychological impact. The audience will have the ability to witness the amazing size of the whale, yet see the intricate detail of the body, in particular the whale’s eye with its evident consciousness and emotion.

To watch the short documentary In the Eye of the Whale, click here. Also, to see a collection of Austin’s gorgeous photographs of whales, head over to his website at StudioCosmos.com.