The American photographer’s latest book is called Bending Light: The Moods of Color. Niall Hampton finds out more

For his previous book, photographer Eric Meola invited the viewer to witness the power of storms. Fierce Beauty documented Meola’s long-held passion for extreme weather conditions and its astonishing photographs are a testament to his dedication and skill.

However, in his latest book, Bending Light: The Moods of Color, the subject is one of the core components of each of the 100 pictures that feature from across Meola’s career, captured on both film and digital cameras. As Bending Light went on sale, we sat down with Meola to find out more about this photographer’s deep love of colour…

How does Bending Light fit in with your previous books – does it form part of a retrospective of your work?

Well, this book is a pause in the story, so to speak, in that I won’t say it’s not the book I wanted to do at this time – I usually find a subject and then stick with it for quite a while – but I’m getting older. I’m in my mid-70s now and don’t want to look back and see that there were photos I should have scanned or wish I’d taken better care of.

My friend Mary Engel, the daughter of the photographer Ruth Orkin, runs a group that focuses on archiving the work of photographers, making sure that photographers organise it and start to look at outlets for it, potentially donating it to galleries or museums in the future. I realised that I had never thought of myself as an extremely prolific photographer but the more I started going through my material, I thought I would never be able to archive it all, as there were so many photographs.

As I looked through, I realised I wanted to do a book because I’d be in control of which images didn’t go in, as well as the ones that did, and I also wanted to be able to write about them. My major in college was English literature, not photography, so I wanted to write three or four paragraphs, not so much about where the photograph was taken or how it was taken, but the story behind it, what insight I gathered from it and the energy it gave me to broaden my photographic horizons.