I often wonder what attracts photographers, myself included, to environments that speak of – best case scenario – better days or – worst case scenario – that present serious destruction. Think of war photography, or documentary photography of a decaying Detroit, for example, or portraits of a drug addict community under siege, homeless camps, derelict factories, you name it.
For some it might be the need to document a process of decay, or hint at the causal roots of it. For others it might be symbolism for whatever psychological message they want to share. For fine arts photographers it is often the sparseness of the subject, or a way to do the modern version of the Vanitas paintings of old. As the Encyclopedia Brittanica defines it: A vanitas painting contains collections of objects symbolic of the inevitability of death and the transience and vanity of earthly achievements and pleasures; it exhorts the viewer to consider mortality and to repent.
Well, I do not ask anyone to do either- to consider mortality or repent! I just felt that there was an intrinsic beauty to the burnt swaths of forest that I hiked through last week.
The Gnarl Ridge fire near Cooper Spur started in August 2008 because of lightning and was finally extinguished by October of that year, having burnt over 3000 acres of trees. Firefighters were able to rescue the few historical structures in its path by wrapping the buildings in flame-retardant materials.
The Dollar Lake Fire near Vista Ridge had a similar course: August to October, almost, and 6300 acres burnt. These are huge areas, visible still today, 6 years later.
Looking at the forest gives you the shivers, it is an alien landscape in its whiteness. If you look at large swaths stretching into the sky below or above you it almost feels skeleton like. But all fleeting moments of morbidity disappear when you look at individual trees close-by. They feel pristine, as if wrapped in some silvery satin, glowing in the light, reflecting it, cleansed of bark.
Here is a link to a short clip on firefighting in Oregon’s forests. The people are mindbogglingly courageous.
“Marston was a man of a thousand lives and a thousand lies. “Olive Richard” was the pen name of Olive Byrne, and she hadn’t gone to visit Marston—she lived with him. She was also the niece of Margaret Sanger, one of the most important feminists of the 20th century. In 1916, Sanger and her sister, Ethel Byrne, Olive Byrne’s mother, had opened the first birth-control clinic in the United States. They were both arrested for the illegal distribution of contraception. In jail in 1917, Ethel Byrne went on a hunger strike and nearly died.
Byrne stayed home and raised the children. They told census-takers and anyone else who asked that Byrne was Marston’s widowed sister-in-law. “Tolerant people are the happiest,” Marston wrote in a magazine essay in 1939, so “why not get rid of costly prejudices that hold you back?” He listed the “Six Most Common Types of Prejudice.” Eliminating prejudice number six—“Prejudice against unconventional people and non-conformists”—meant the most to him. Byrne’s sons didn’t find out that Marston was their father until 1963—when Holloway finally admitted it—and only after she extracted a promise that no one would raise the subject ever again.“
http://www.mnn.com/your-home/organic-farming-gardening/stories/the-science-of-blue-flowers
