“There are some things you learn best in calm, and some in storm,” noted Willa Cather, the Nebraska writer who described a fading American frontier and the enduring landscape of the Great Plains.

Eric Meola  understands what she was getting at.

Meola, acclaimed as both a commercial and fine-art photographer, has spent the past several years traversing the Great Plains, capturing the vast expanse in its ghostliest and most violent guises. In 2012, Meola began booking tours with a storm-chasing group called Tempest Tours, during which he has photographed the magnificent, deadly weather of the region. Over three seasons, he has traveled nearly 25,000 miles across seven states with the group.

The result is an exhibition, “Storm Chaser: New Photographs,”  at the Bernaducci.Meisel Gallery in New York City through September 26. His images of massive supercells and threatening vortexes reveal the sure hand of a masterful photographer and impassioned observer filled with a sense of nature’s power.

Meola does not, however, consider himself a storm chaser. “True storm chasers have paid their dues. They know their meteorology, they can accurately describe what’s going on in the photo of a storm. I’m getting better at it,” he says, “but I’m not a storm chaser.”

Nor are storms all he is interested in. Meola has taken other photographic trips to the area, from Montana to Kansas, looking for a different vision of the Great Plains — a place where sky and land meet over a timeless horizon, where solitude, lost towns and echoes from the past are as much a part of the environment as tornadoes.

“I had always wanted to do a book on America, and it’s hard to do a unique book on America. But the Great Plains fascinated me,” Meola says. “To this day, it is still a virtually uninhabited place. You have the corn fields and wheat fields, few highways but a lot of dirt roads — this incredibly beautiful landscape and emptiness and the storms.”

Darkness On the Edge of Town

In a sense, his journey began in 1977, when he took a trip through the West with Bruce Springsteen in a 1965 Ford Galaxy convertible.

Meola met Springsteen in the early ’70s, after seeing him perform at Max’s Kansas City, the famed New York City nightclub. He later shot the iconic cover of his “Born to Run” album, and when the rock star needed photographs for another album, “Darkness On the Edge of Town,” Meola proposed a trip. “I figured it would be good to get him out on the open road and away from the studio and the Jersey Shore,” he says.

They flew to Salt Lake City, rented the Ford from a used-car dealer, and headed toward Reno, Nevada. On the way, they encountered an epic storm. “The sky went black and all of a sudden we were putting the top of the car up and running for our lives,” Meola says.

Later, Springsteen wrote “The Promised Land,” with lyrics about “a dark cloud rising from the desert floor” and “a twister to blow everything down.”

The storm made a lasting impression on Meola as well. “I wanted to go back and photograph something like that, but I never got the opportunity,” he says.

Around 2010, he began to think about storms in earnest. By that time, severe weather had become a growth business: The 1996 film Twister had popularized the idea of storm chasing, while Sebastian Junger’s 1997 book A Perfect Storm introduced a new phrase to the American lexicon. Meanwhile, even as the idea of climate change began to take hold, the Weather Channel turned killer storms into reality-TV and videos of tornadoes became a popular feature on YouTube. Storm-chasing tourism became a thing.

On his first trip with Tempest Tours, Meola saw two tornadoes and discovered their shattering allure.

“When you see this cloud suddenly take shape in front of you and turn into a vortex within seconds, and then you see the color of the hail — the glow of the greenish cyan cerulean blue — it’s something you’ll never forget,” he says. “You feel frigid air rush out at you from an outflow, or warm air from an inflow, and you hear this sound, like a thin curtain of tin being shaken by some force,” he says. “I’d never heard that kind of sound before. I’d heard rumbles and thunder, but this was a shimmering sound, and it was the eeriest thing I’d ever heard.”

Photographing storms is a matter of preparedness: “When something happens, it happens fast,” says Meola, who travels with two 36-megapixel Nikon D810s — one with a 14-24mm ultra-wide zoom and the other with a 24-70mm zoom — along a 70-200mm zoom in his bag. “I try to have everything nailed down in terms of what lens I want to use and what ISO I want to shoot at thought out before hand, because often you’re working in the near dark,” he says.

As he composes, he tends to crop with the sky filling most of the frame. “In one sense, the top is the most important part of the picture, but equally important is the bottom part,” he says. “I’m not a big proponent of having something in the frame to give scale, but when there is something out of the ordinary in the scene that gives that scale, I try to incorporate it.”

Words and Images

Meola’s photographs of storms express his awe of nature’s fury, but they are not entirely about awe, not in the sense that much storm photography is. One of the qualities that sets the work apart is the color he captures. “Essentially, storms are black and white,” he says. “But I sensed that within the black and white there was color. The tornadoes per se didn’t interest me that much. My photography has always been about color.”

The visual vocabulary of Meola’s work — with its strong, saturated hues — owes much to the influence of an early mentor, photographer Pete Turner. Meola took a job with Turner, whose color work had a great impact on commercial photography in the 1970s, after graduating from Syracuse University, a school known for its photography program. Meola, however, studied English Literature while he was there, thereby gaining a different kind of vocabulary. “Words mean a lot to me — as much as visuals,” he says. His personal projects over the years — including his 2008 book India: In Word and Image — have reflected that impulse.

While exploring the Great Plains, Meola has looked to both writers and photographers for inspiration — he cites in particular Ian Frazier’s bestselling travelog Great Plains and Wright Morris’s The Inhabitants, which combined narrative and and photography. The black-and-white work of  photographer David Plowden has long been an influence.

“Once I started going to the Great Plains, I realized why Plowden spent his whole life there,” says Meola. “To me, it’s one of the most beautiful places in the world.”

Meola expects to be returning often to the heartland of America. “This is really more of a five- to six-year project,” he says. He recently visited North Dakota, where he photographed abandoned churches, and he’s already booked three storm-chasing tours for the 2016 season.

During one of his trips to the Great Plains, Meola spent a night in Red Cloud, Nebraska, in the home of Willa Cather. There, he could learn from the calm. Later, he will be back with the storms.