The ‘Imagemakers’ section investigates how a photograph influences our view of reality. This week: the heat tourists creating fascinating research material for scientists in the future.
Weird guys, those people. Came specially driven to Furnace Creek in Death Valley (you should forget about those names just because of those names) to have their picture taken with a digital thermometer. Because a heat record could be broken: the hottest day in the hottest place on earth – of course you’re crazy if you don’t want to experience that. “It’s nice to be here for such a record,” one man said in a video RTL News. He came across as a little laconic-bored, like he posed every weekend with a record, but would much rather have stayed home and cleaned the grill.
In the Netherlands, where I received the word ‘unchangeable’ in the weather report as if it were manna from heaven, I spent the past week looking at photos that seemed to come from hell, or at least the vestibule. Forest fires came from all corners of the world, even from Switzerland. A Greek firefighter stood little ones in front of a ferociously flaming tree, his red water hose just an accessory that colored nicely with his helmet. While it was snowing in Johannesburg, in Rome a man hung his head down in a fountain pond to cool off.
This has been the picture of summer for a few years now, at least in this hemisphere. They are interchangeable postcards of increasingly frequent extreme weather events, greetings from a warming planet. I am slowly getting used to it, which is also a disturbing development.
Furnace Creek tourists seemed unaffected by the heat and climate concerns. And what would we complain? Wasn’t it always warm here? A consequence of Death Valley’s geographic location: below sea level and caught between high, rust-colored mountains that keep the warm air inside. This was already the case in 1913, when the current heat record was set. Nope, don’t worry.
They stood cheerfully next to the monitor at the visitor center, on which increasingly higher temperatures appeared. Thumbs up, clothes off, hat on, and smile. A man put his arm on the metal casing of the thermometer for a nanosecond and immediately pulled it back. Laugh. 46 degrees, 53, 54, 56. Yaw. A young woman was in this place for the first time in her life, ‘and then it’s the hottest day’. Found them ‘cool’. Roar.
As for photography, it was fun again. A new typology emerged here in a short time: the heat tourist, comparable to the storm chaser, someone who chases hurricanes. Always the same scene, people next to and in front of the temperature display with the concrete columns and the accompanying mosaic, which schematically shows how hot it is at different height levels in the landscape. Always the same sweltering desert in the background.
Such an image category is useful for the scientists of generations after us. They will be surprised to find that we were also very proud of our high temperatures. After all, humanity had caused it all by itself.
There was still some sputtering coming from the oven. It came from a climate activist who had also come to Furnace Creek, dressed in a beige outfit with a blood red scarf. He too had himself immortalized in the same typological way next to the visitor center, but his motives were completely opposite. “This is the climate crisis,” read his one handwritten protest sign, decorated with red bows. “Happy Death Day” said the other, in letters from a colorful birthday garland.
“In ten, twenty years it will be 60 degrees here,” the man told the BBC. “What’s there to celebrate?” It was a rhetorical question, but had it been an ordinary question, the answer would not have been forthcoming. Just thumbs up and say ‘cheese’. That’s all you need to do.
