On our annual camping trip to Middle Saranac Lake over Labor Day weekend, I got stoned and discovered my true vocation: cloud photographer. For perhaps an hour, I lay on my back as the boat drifted across the water, snapping what appeared to be astonishing images of celestial drama—vaporous stallions, collapsing empires, the face of God (a woman, it turns out). I took dozens. Each seemed more profound than the last. Reviewing them later, sober, I found mostly, well, clouds. Perfectly respectable clouds, certainly, but hardly the lost Ansel Adams portfolio I remembered creating.
I had failed to account for the gap between experience and documentation. (T. S. Eliot captured it succinctly in “The Hollow Men”: “Between the conception / And the creation / Falls the shadow.”) The clouds had been moving. The light had been changing. The sky was immense, the lake was glittering, and I was pleasantly unencumbered by skepticism. My phone captured several white objects against a blue background. The clouds hadn’t failed as subjects; photography had failed as a delivery system. You had to be there—possibly under the influence.
Afterward, I wrote a short newsletter introduction about my thwarted artistic breakthrough and expected readers to chuckle, then proceed to the useful material below. Instead, messages began arriving. Many of you wrote to confess your own cloud habits, enthusiasms, and episodes of staring skyward. Friends began texting me cloud photos, apparently trusting that I could now evaluate their findings. The volume of the response surprised me. I thought I was writing about weed and bad photography. Apparently, I had stumbled into a constituency.
Then newsletter subscribers John and Dianne escalated matters.
They bought me a membership to the Cloud Appreciation Society. I am now Member 67,837, which suggests either that plenty of people still look up or that humanity has exhausted the available terrestrial hobbies.
I hadn’t known that cloud appreciation required an organization, but I was delighted to learn that it did. An interest becomes more serious once you receive a membership number. I now have credentials. If you see me studying the sky, please do not interrupt. I may be working.
Founded by Gavin Pretor-Pinney, Cloud Appreciation Society welcomes “artists, scientists, cloudspotters and dreamers.” It is based in Somerset, England, which feels appropriate. The British have long understood that an enthusiasm becomes respectable once it has a society, a postal address, and a founder with a hyphenated surname.
Its website features cloud photography, videos, art, poetry, music, courses, forums, and a CloudSpotter app that helps users identify 58 formations and optical effects. Members can progress from pointing upward and saying, “That one looks like a rabbit,” to pointing upward and saying, “That appears to be a virga formation, with trails of precipitation falling from the Altocumulus clouds and dissipating in the drier air below,” which sounds more authoritative but may be slightly less fun. Give any innocent pleasure enough terminology and someone will eventually start correcting strangers.
The society’s premise is simple: Clouds deserve the attention of nonmeteorologists. This makes them badly suited to the prevailing economy. Attention is now captured, measured, sliced into increments, and sold to companies that would like us to purchase mattresses, supplements, meal kits, and yet another summer-weight cashmere sweater. (Thank you, Quince.) A cloud has no business model. It cannot follow you across the internet, harvest your data, or offer 20 percent off if you act before midnight. It performs for whoever happens to look up, then dissolves without requesting feedback.
The looking-up part matters. As an editor, I spend most of my working life looking down—at manuscripts, proofs, emails, calendars, budgets, and the glowing rectangle that promises access to all human knowledge but mostly delivers press releases announcing immersive experiences, reimagined hospitality, and the triumphant return of brunch. Cloud gazing reverses the posture. It lifts the chin. It shifts the focal distance from 14 inches to infinity. It also produces nothing measurable, which may be its most valuable feature.
We have become suspicious of activities that yield no product. A walk should count steps. A vacation should generate photographs. A hobby should become a side hustle. Rest should improve future productivity. If cloud gazing could be logged on Strava, somebody would already be King of the Mountain. Staring at clouds resists this accounting. You might learn their names or photograph them, but neither is necessary. The basic activity consists of stopping whatever allegedly important thing you were doing and watching water vapor rearrange itself.
Humans have been finding meaning in those rearrangements forever. We see ships, dragons, faces, continents, saints, cartoon characters, and deceased relatives. The technical term is pareidolia, the tendency to detect familiar forms in random patterns. Calling it pareidolia makes it sound like a cognitive defect. I prefer to think of it as imagination refusing to clock out. The cloud provides the raw material; the mind completes the picture. Two people can look at the same formation and see entirely different worlds, neither of which will exist five minutes later.
That impermanence may explain why cloud photographs so often disappoint. A cloud is an event disguised as an object. Its beauty depends on its transformation. The photograph pins it down, but the pinning is also a small betrayal. My Adirondack pictures are records of what the clouds looked like, but they cannot reproduce what it felt like to watch them become something else.
Still, I keep taking pictures. Since returning home, I have found myself looking skyward more often, as if membership has conferred an obligation. The other evening, I stood in my backyard photographing wisps of cloud threaded through the fading light above the neighboring rooftops. I was sober. The pictures were better. Or perhaps Member 67,837 has learned to lower his standards.
Either way, I’m grateful to everyone who wrote, and especially to John and Dianne for making my new status official. I thought I was sharing photographic evidence of an afternoon when my judgment had become agreeably elastic. What came back was confirmation that tens of thousands of us are still willing to stop what we’re doing and stare at water vapor.
Perhaps humanity has not exhausted the available terrestrial hobbies after all. We’re just looking in the wrong direction.
