Can photography truly convey the horror of an uncontained wildfire? Can images transport the viewer into that reality? Can they communicate via screens and printed pages the intense heat, the air that’s painful to breathe, the darkness of the smoke filled sky, the devastating destruction? Crucially, can they make tangible the link between this crisis and the wider climate crisis affecting us all?
There’s no doubt that photographs can show these realities, but the challenge in our visually saturated world is to find the images that provoke a deeper connection.
Captured, transmitted, published and shared in their thousands, the images of the fires sweeping Los Angeles (LA) are devastating – in many cases overwhelming – yet often evoke a striking beauty. Photographers working on the ground balance significant personal risk against the need for a reality to be seen, with many covering devastation that they are personally directly affected by in their own communities.
What role can these images play in making the link between the reality of the fires sweeping LA and the enormity of the climate crisis that will only make catastrophic events like this worse?
Photographs of wildfires are not shocking by virtue of being new, in many ways the scenes pictured are all too familiar to audiences. Buildings engulfed by flames, emergency services responding on the front line, silhouetted figures, skylines ablaze and aircraft dropping a red and pink powder that stands out even against the red of fire. As the fire moves, the scenes in the images show the devastation left in its wake. The aerial photographs of flattened communities, details of objects in the wreckage; a religious figure here, a fluttering American flag there. Packed with emotion, these photographs often show people returning to their lives, distraught at what they find.
Figures such as the estimated $200bn cost of the blaze are shocking only by the fact they are obviously huge, but equally what do they really mean to the reader? Photographs help to bring these statistics to life and ground them in reality – a sort of evidence for what big numbers mean in bricks, streets, and communities. For the viewer it’s hard not to look at these photographs, but it’s also hard not to be overwhelmed by them. The scale and severity of the devastation is both brutally clear, but impossible to really comprehend.
Josh Edelson’s photograph (above) of a tree burning in front of a McDonald’s restaurant in Pasadena during the Eaton Fire is a striking example of what is in many ways a quieter image. It is still full of drama; the searing highlights on the burning tree, the angry red toning across the whole frame, and the almost painterly streaks of the burning embers on the wind. But when viewed alongside other images of raging flames, emergency responders and affected communities it has a quietness about it.
It is the looming ‘golden arches’ that bring the impact, making this image one of the best examples so far of what photography can do so powerfully in the reporting on wildfires – the uncanny combination of something so familiar with something so alien.
The photograph is at first glance an image of a burning tree in front of that particular McDonald’s restaurant in Pasadena, yet in the same instance it is an image of our ‘normal’ on fire. It is both bluntly familiar yet strikingly wrong. This feeling runs strongly through many of the photographs of the fires in LA – views and scenes so commonly visualised through photography now cast with an angry orange glow, filled with towering flames and smoke. As a viewer these images shock in their transformation from the normal to the not, even when, as with Edelson’s photograph above, the scene depicted is bordering on the bizarrely serene. Whilst it is impossible to imagine what it must feel to be the person in a photograph returning to their destroyed home after a fire, it is possible to imagine a similar scene to the one in Edelson’s photograph within your life and frame of reference. The uncanny combination of the familiar and the extreme brings with it a realisation that this is a ‘normal’ too. Add in the context of climate change and this becomes a ‘normal’ that is ever more present.
This is not to say that photographs depicting human emotion are not powerful, or that images of the impacts of climate change outside of global cities cannot achieve the same impact. It is to ask the questions: firstly, in an environment so saturated with imagery, which photographs endure; secondly: which photographs successfully make a connection between the immediate story and the bigger picture? Josh Edelson’s photograph cuts through a crowded visual environment and succeeds in connecting the reality in the picture with a wider reality, simultaneously functioning as a journalistic image and as an imaginable future.
As the number of images of the fires each of us sees grows with every phone scroll and website view, which are remembered, and which have a lasting impact becomes ever more critical. Photographs like Edelson’s stand out because of their ability to help audiences relate to what they show. They can be viewed both literally and metaphorically, and in both readings the impact lies in the relatability.
There is no doubt that the scenes in LA depicted in photographs are devastating, as is true with photographs of the impacts of climate change across the world. With this devastation comes a responsibility for visual storytelling that connects with and moves audiences, both during the immediate event and in the aftermath. To ask if the true horror of an uncontained wildfire can ever be conveyed by a photograph is to ask the wrong question. Detailed visual reporting of climate change impacts such as wildfires is vital. The more important question is which photographs can lastingly engage audiences on a deeper level, and why?
Photographs can transport the viewer to the reality they depict, but, in connecting immediate reporting with the wider climate crisis, the power of Edelson’s photograph lies in the way it transports that reality into the viewer’s own.
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