Fire & Ice in Oregon
Turning an artist’s eye on the damage to Oregon's forests from climate change
Late last summer, the Lookout Fire blasted its way through Oregon’s 15,800-acre H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest, a gem of a place that lies in the Cascade range about an hour’s drive up the McKenzie River from Eugene. While the forest headquarters complex was spared, thousands of acres were turned from lush green forest – much of it old growth – to blackened desolation.
Then, last winter, a storm blanketed much of Lane County with ice so thick that entire stretches of forest began to collapse under its weight. For four days and nights at our home in the woods we could hear the steady sounds of limbs breaking around us, punctuated by visceral loud booms as entire large trees snapped off or uprooted and fell to the ground. Old timers in the neighborhood — Vern has lived and worked here for 70 years — can remember nothing like this ever happening.
I am not a documentary photographer. After all, I left my newspaper job this year so I could spend more time doing art photography rather than reporting news. I am also not fond of art done for a political cause; the results usually look more like shallow propaganda than anything deeply interesting.
But the incredible destruction caused by these two climate-related events has drawn me into the forest time and again this year with my cameras. At first, I was out there because the forest surrounding our house is now very different. The woods we know so well have been transformed, with dozens of tall trees lying on the ground, the trails we built now impassable, the thick forest canopy suddenly opened up and letting in the sky.
That familiar forest I have photographed for years has become a new and unknown place. Much of it is now unwalkable, covered waist deep in debris. It’s like entering an alien reality, one that requires new and different approaches to making pictures.
The Andrews, too, has been transformed. After staying away from HJA immediately following the fires, I’ve begun taking my cameras there again, carefully checking out old and familiar places to see how they survived last summer’s blaze.
My connection to the Andrews goes back a decade. In 2014 I spent a wonderful week and a half as an artist in residence there. That residency gave me a comfortable apartment at headquarters, a two-way radio – in case I got lost or trapped behind a newly fallen tree on one of the back roads – and no obligation to do anything other than to visit a list of interesting places given me by Fred Swanson, a scientist and a senior fellow with the Spring Creek Project, which manages the artist and writer residencies at the forest.
Photos I made that week and in subsequent visits were used to illustrate the 2016 book Forest Under Story: Creative Inquiry in an Old-Growth Forest, a collection of essays and poems about the Andrews edited by Swanson, Charles Goodrich and Nathaniel Brodie, and published by University of Washington Press.
Each day at the Andrews I got up, had breakfast, and headed out into the woods to take photographs. At first I wasn’t at all sure what I wanted to photograph, so I took pictures of anything and everything. But gradually I found myself drawn to the magnificent old growth stumps that can be found almost everywhere in the forest. I had brought light stands with me, thinking I might do portraits of some of the staff. Instead, I used them for lit portraits of stumps.
Those stump portraits ended up being shown at the (now, sadly, defunct) Jacobs Gallery inside Eugene’s Hult Center for the Performing Arts. My first big show.
When I revisited the Andrews in the late winter this year, I was shocked at the desolation along Lookout Creek, which forms a geological backbone of the forest. Whole stretches of woods have been reduced to charcoal. The ground is blackened. The once lush 3.5-mile Old Growth Trail next to the creek is just about impassable.
And, once again, the challenge of photographing familiar territory that is now completely unfamiliar has been calling me. How, for example, do you depict a landscape that has become uniformly black?
So, a project called Fire & Ice, working with the unfamiliar terrain and the sense of desolation, grief and, ultimately, regrowth that comes to the forest following such a catastrophe.
I’ve been invited to show the resulting work late next year in the art gallery at the Bandon Public Library. (Bandon, for you non-Oregonians, is a scenic little town on the south Oregon coast.) I’m actually kind of happy that the gallery was fully booked until fall of 2025; that gives me plenty of time to work with this new subject matter and present a well-conceived body of work that will run in October and November 2025. Details to follow when available!
Lots to think about here. I wonder how you will make art from a burned forest, a landscape of ugliness. Is art necessarily beautiful? Tragedy can certainly be art, but I suppose if it is it’s imbued with some sort of majesty or pathos — something besides waste and misery. Of course, the regrowth may have its own loveliness. That is certainly true of landscapes that frequently undergo periodic burning. But what if it’s just weeds and invasive species? You have chosen a difficult but interesting project to begin your new life.
Sorry, Bob, for this long thing. I started to write a sentence and got involved. Best of luck in this new venture. I so admire your method and dedication and the lovely images that result.
Thanks, Anne, for the thoughtful comment. As you say, the burned landscape can be stark and even ugly, but it does provide a setting for regrowth and a kind of redemption.