An innovative way of seeing how a major forest recovers from a
devastating fire.
In the summer of 2011, in the Jemez Mountains of New Mexico, a falling
power line sparked a wildfire that burned 158,753 acres of forest. From
their home in Santa Fe, thirty air miles southeast, photographers
Patricia Galagan and Philip Metcalf watched what came to be known as the
Las Conchas fire burn day and night for more than a month.
As soon as the roads reopened, they went to the mountains to see the
damage this violent fire had wrought. Taking a trail to the rim of
Cochiti Canyon, they passed through sections of forest that had burned
so hot that nothing remained but blackened trunks and negative spaces
where huge tree roots had been. The canyon and the waves of ridges
beyond were black with standing dead trees.
The visual chaos of the burned forest, at first daunting, pushed them to
look harder, to see differently. As they did so, the forest began to
look beautiful in its highly altered state. For more than seven years
they were compelled to make photographs of the aftermath of the fire to
draw people beyond the news-cycle images of smoke and flames into the
reality of a forest after an extreme fire. Forest Ghosts is both their
ode to the old forest and their gift to help us understand that, in this
era of accelerating climate change and increasingly devastating
wildfires all over the American West, the new forests will never be the
same, but we can still find beauty and enlightenment in the aftermath.
