how do I photograph a wildfire?

If you type in the search term ‘forest fire’ on the Getty Images site, the world’s largest photo agency, you will come across tens of thousands of images, an infernal wallpaper of a burning world, with the human dimension here and there in the form of the silhouette of a firefighter or a burnt out car.

Nowadays, many images are added every day, from all corners of the world and continents. So much so that only a fraction is posted, even online, where this newspaper now also maintains the live blog ‘Extreme weather’, an ongoing account of an increasingly rapidly developing crisis, also known as ‘climate disaster’. In terms of images, it is sometimes difficult not to turn down emotionally at the number of hot spots, or even worse, to notice that you are only looking for the spectacles or ‘the most beautiful disaster photography’.

Sometimes a story without images can very well take you back to a place and a moment. On Friday, August 18, the daily podcast (The Daily) by The New York Times under the title ‘How a Paradise Became a Death Trap’ dedicated to the catastrophic fire on the island of Maui in Hawaii. The reporter got Ydriss Nouara, a resident of the burnt-out town of Lahaina, to tell his chilling story about the day the fire came. And it came without warning and without sirens in the form of a shower of fire driven by hurricane-force winds.

Desperate search

Before Ydriss thought of himself, he thought of his cat, which he couldn’t find anywhere. His account of a desperate search is unusually poignant, because as a listener you feel that the dilemma was unsolvable and life-threatening at the time. The narrator’s dull resignation says a lot: he has lost everything, but he has also, and perhaps most importantly, failed as the owner of a cat that he had to leave behind in a sea of ​​flames.

So I immediately thought of Ydriss’s cat when the photo from Getty photographer Justin Sullivan surfaced. In the dry language of the photo caption, “A cat walks past burnt-out cars in a wildfire-ravaged neighborhood of Lahaina, Hawaii.” The photo came online on Aug. 18, the same day Ydriss’s story came to The Daily could be heard.

In a blackened world, the cat is strikingly bright white. Sullivan’s photo was taken with a drone and is part of an entire drone report, in which the scale of the destruction is particularly striking. The area may not have been released by the fire brigade so soon after the fire, due to the risk of explosion and loose electricity cables (also clearly visible in the photo). Most of the shots in the report are overview images from a few tens of meters above the disaster area, a landscape from which all color seems to have disappeared, as it was described in this newspaper. But when the cat came into view, Sullivan lowered the drone.

Much experience

Justin Sullivan is a photographer based in California, where he has gained a lot of drone experience over the past few years from the major wildfires that have ravaged his state. Meanwhile, there are a disturbing number of websites devoted to the subject: how do I photograph a wildfire? In summary: keep your distance, think about the wind direction, listen to the fire brigade. It is a niche where many amateurs occupy themselves, comparable to tornado chasers. But look at the website of a professional like Sullivan and you can see at a glance that he is way ahead of the competition in his area.

Meanwhile, elsewhere. Paige Taylor White photographed a man and his parrot on Aug. 20 in a Walmart parking lot near Western Canada’s Bush Creek East Wildfire, one of several blazes in the area that have displaced 50,000 families. Angelos Tzortzinis photographed a man fleeing with his horses in a suburb of Athens, Greece, on Aug. 22. Gökhan Balci photographed a man rescuing chickens in Çanakkale, Turkey, on August 23. The statement that the planet is on fire this summer is not hyperbole.

Involuntary thought: Has Ydriss Nouara also seen the photo of Justin Sullivan’s white cat? And did he draw hope from this? Or did he recognize the cat? Pointless thought, of course; it’s not Hollywood here.