Legendary Bruce Springsteen photographer’s iconic travel images showcased in lavish new coffee-table book, from storms in South Dakota to penguins in Antarctica

This image, entitled ‘Penguin Contemplation’, was taken at the Weddell Sea in Antarctica in 1998, on Meola’s first trip to the region. Meola watched the penguin as it ‘contemplated’ a jump into the water below. He says: ‘Holding my breath, I quickly fired off a burst of frames, and the sound of the camera’s motor drive caused a commotion. Several people suddenly stood up, and when they did, I lost my balance and fell back. Just then, the penguin dove into the water. A few weeks later, looking at my film, I saw I had caught the moment when the penguin was standing alone on that crenellated crag of ice’

A captivating image, ‘Siesta’ was taken in Oaxaca, Mexico, in 1975. Meola had been commissioned by a friend to travel to Mexico to photograph coffee plantations. He says: ‘One afternoon, as I listened to a group of men talking, I noticed one of them had fallen asleep, oblivious to the banter of his friends, and unaware of my camera. The photograph was there for anyone to make’

This striking image, titled ‘Turquoise Elephant with Stars’, depicts an elephant in captivity in Jaipur, India, in 2011. Meola says: ‘In modern-day India, elephants are often mistreated and used to transport tourists for profit. I photographed this one, painted turquoise, outside the Amber Fort, near Jaipur’

This beautiful image of tulip and hyacinth flowers, taken in 1988 in the Netherlands, marked the first time Meola had ever photographed red and purple together in nature. Meola says: ‘What drew me to this intersection of colour was the geometry of the red tulips cutting through the field of grape hyacinth. The third colour – the small splashes of blue-green grasses – intensifies the red and purple’

A hypnotic image, Meola took ‘Psychedelic Bar’ at a restaurant near his home in New York in 2010. Meola was attracted by the bar’s plexiglass panels and ‘sat at the bar for half an hour making multiple exposures of each row’. He explains: ‘I added one layer on top of each other until I got the stair-stepping effect I was looking for. In my mind, this was how it looked to me, and yet I didn’t have a single drink’

This mesmerising image, ‘Driving Across America’, was taken on a road trip through the Badlands National Park in 1984, when the photographer was travelling with his wife, Joanna. He recalls: ‘In the fading twilight, we were on the road. Ahead of us, the glowing red taillights of a lone car curved through the South Dakota badlands. Joanna and I were tired, ready to pull off onto the side, and numb with the buzz of driving for weeks on more than 12,000 miles of the highways and backroads of America’

This powerful photo, called ‘Feather Man’, was taken in Papua New Guinea in 1996 when Meola was photographing tribes for a book called ‘Last Places on Earth’. He says: ‘Our vehicle stopped in the middle of the road for a number of tribesmen who came out of the jungle and confronted us. Papua New Guinea is home to some of the most exotic bird species on the planet, appropriately named “Birds of Paradise”, and the subject of this photograph “Feather Man”, was adorned with a crown of bright-red feathers’

Meola captured this incredible image of a tornado in South Dakota in 2018 while on the ‘most exhausting and adrenaline-pumping storm chase’ he’d ever been on. He adds: ‘The conditions were difficult, to say the least, there were so many tornadoes and precipitation that it took an incredible effort by meteorologist extraordinaire Bill Reid to track them.’ Meola took this ‘razor-sharp’ image of a tornado ‘silhouetted by lightning’ at night in the van on the way back to his motel

Meola stumbled upon this motel in California’s Mojave Desert in 1978, describing it as a ‘ten-ton block of concrete waiting for aliens to land’ with a ‘loudly humming sound’. He says: ‘As my assistant and I watched, the humming became louder, as if it was the sound-track from a bad horror film. We stared, transfixed, at the cinder block, washed in acid-green and yellow light, and its pulsing red neon nightlight that declared in shorthand “Motel”. I photographed the sign and wondered if there was a curse that came with making photographs of it’

This impressive image, ‘Rendezvous in the Desert’, was taken in Agadez in Niger in 1996. Meola was in the West African country to photograph the Tuareg and Wodaabe tribes and this moment was captured at the Gerewol festival, a gathering of dancing, singing and courtship. He says: ‘The tribes were circled around the ceremonies to observe them, and I had crawled outside the circle to look back from a distance. In the emptiness of the desert, the spectacle of the mounted tribes and their chanting was breathtaking’

In ‘Becoming Buddha’, Meola depicts a young boy undergoing the ‘Shinbyu’ ceremony in Myanmar, the process of being initiated as a novice monk. The boys have their head shaved in the ‘symbolic passage from boyhood to manhood’. Meola, who describes the image as ‘career-changing’, says: ‘I was aware of holding my breath because I realised the shutter speed was going to be very slow. I realised at that moment that my life had changed, and that I had been privileged to witness a precious few moments that marked a passage in this young boy’s life’

This powerful image depicts the ash cloud caused by the eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajokull volcano in 2010. Meola watched the eruption amid a ‘small group of photographers’. He says: ‘No IMAX, no AI, just a flash of primeval wonder as we witnessed a unique moment when fire shot violently from the top of a crater covered with snow. As night became the next day, the volcano shut down, the eruption stopped, and we knew we had all been changed forever’

Bending Light: The Moods of Color is published by Images Publishing Group and is available from £51.34 on Amazon.co.uk