untitled (cut postcard, 2022) (Patreon)

This was a shot I specifically took for Postcards From the End of the World. I explicitly sought out the burn scar from the Moose Fire that took place in early 2022, which was one of the largest and most intense in Idaho history. Many of the more recent wildfire shots in the book, and the ones that I've posted, are from that burn. 

This shot got cut just barely; the way I storyboarded the book was to get 4x6 prints from Shutterfly (lol) of every photo I was considering for the narrative, so about 60-70 shots. I lined them up on a table, and then slowly whittled them down as I considered the emotional impact of the shot, the patterns and echoes that shots would create in certain orderings, and the storytelling implications of each photograph (as I hadn't written the postcards themselves beyond a brief outline yet). This one almost made it all the way to the end.

While this shot isn't my favorite stand-alone photograph, it is a phenomenal storytelling shot. It feels wildly overwhelming to look at, thanks to the blackened canyons towering above the edges of the frame and the dead... everything. Purposely dipping the shadows to make everything richly black and just vaguely textured helps add a sense of deep, unrecoverable damage to the scene. A dash of my usual split-toning makes the landscape virtually alien. It may not be a pretty sight, but it is unsettling, which was my goal.

The shot I went with instead, however, was this: 

This one feels less imposing—the sky isn't blotted out by the world here—which fit more of the tone of the book early on (where Kate is still very calm and matter-of-fact). The destruction is still clearly vast and virtually total, which helped give the impression that whatever apocalypse had happened was almost unsurvivable; the other shot is a much smaller scene. I also think it's a relatively simple photograph with a lot less texture, but simple was also good: the prints are six inches long on their longest side. A complicated frame with a small subject isn't ideal for printing at that size, which is why I purposely ordered real-size prints first to storyboard. 

Anyway, hope you enjoyed the peek at what my cutting-room floor looks like.