Stuart Palley, American
El Portal Fire from Tunnel View, 2014
This photo is part of a series of photographs that the artist Palley has been collecting into the book Terra Flamma, which he released in 2018, documenting the wildfires across California. The image here was made through a long exposure view of the slope as fire raged on. This image presents the sheer scale of the fires, potentially at the cost of producing a distance to their threat. The fire is massive in this image, and its hotspots appear akin to an inverted starfield, producing inverse constellations of destruction on the landscape. Forests become isolated stands of trees, the sky becomes a monochrome orange, reflecting the sheer size of the fires and the devastation they have been able to wreak. Label by Frank Kennedy