As the West Burns
Living in the western United States entails a certain familiarity with the spectacle of wildfires. Several geographic regions around the world find themselves particularly prone to these events, with the grand expanse of the American West being one of the dominant environments in which this natural phenomenon occurs.
Yosemite National Park, California
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I first became interested in wildfires when I relocated to Arizona from the East Coast a little more than a decade ago. As a photographer, much of my initial engagement of this subject was visual, but I was drawn equally to the power and context of these events over a longer period of time and across diverse landscapes. Consequently, I began a documentary photographic series that aims to provide a broader visual and narrative understanding of wildland fires, as well as the forces that surround them.
Currently I have traveled throughout Arizona, California, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington photographing locations and people connected to wildland fires. Eventually all of the western United States — including Alaska — and British Columbia will be featured so that the most expansive vision of this subject matter might be recorded and presented.
Because I want to record as much information as physically possible while engaging the subject of wildfires with the greatest potential depth and seriousness, I chose to use a large-format view camera that produces an 8- by 10-inch negative — a very large piece of film that can produce extreme enlargements with immense detail. The very slow process of assembling the camera and composing a scene necessitates a more studious and intent approach for crafting each image. The possibility of taking snapshots or quickly releasing the shutter is non-existent. There is something magical about shrouding oneself in a dark cloth and viewing the ground glass — roughly equivalent to the size of a person's face — in reverse and upside down, which is how operators of this equipment have been seeing the world for the past 170 years.
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This heightened concentration allows me to become better acquainted with individual fire sites, exploring them thoroughly and patiently before I even begin photographing. I most often allot only a single negative per location. Another benefit of working with a large-format camera is that when someone encounters the large prints, they are in a way transported to the site itself. Physically experiencing these locations has allowed me to gain a greater understanding of the power of wildfires, and my hope is that in the larger viewing format, the audience will as well.
One facet of the project is the return to areas that remain affected by fires long after the media have run their headlines. The subtleties of reforestation or of nature re-generating itself are best witnessed after traveling to sites of fires while they are in progress — and again a few days, months, years or even decades later.
Consider the devastating Tillamook Burn, in which 350,000 acres of prime northwestern Oregon forestland were charred in fires that ranged from 1933 to 1951 following logging accidents. Widespread evidence of this ruined landscape was visible well into the 1970s, and most people believed that they would never see the forest evolve beyond that state. However, the largest volunteer reseeding effort ever organized in the nation eventually brought the environment back to life.
Today the entire Tillamook State Forest has regenerated, and while it will still take centuries to restore the Douglas firs to their formerly massive height, this fire is both a display of the sheer force of nature as well as humanity's ability to adapt and learn from it, as evidenced by the creation of the Tillamook State Forest Interpretive Center.
Seventy-five percent of all wildland fires are ignited naturally as a consequence of lightning, but people have greatly affected the occurrence and extent of these fires in several ways. Besides the obvious cases of arson, the migration from the suburbs into the wildland-urban interface has signaled an era of suppressing natural fires to protect people's lives and property. According to Jim Paxon, the chief information officer on the 500,000-acre Rodeo-Chediski Fire in 2002, "mega-fires" are only growing more extreme and catastrophic as a result of these and related factors.
Still, there are some actions aimed at restoring the natural balance of dry-vegetation fuel and healthy landscape, such as the intentional setting of prescribed burns. In Yosemite National Park, officials routinely set these fires at the beginning and end of the wildfire season to clear out dangerous undergrowth and mimic the approximately 16,000 acres of the park that historically burned in natural fires each year. The scale of the controlled burns falls short of this figure, but they nonetheless represent a positive sign that we are learning from nature's own intrinsic cycles.
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