Fire Ghosts

About

About the Authors
Philip Metcalf is a landscape photographer who creates black-and-white infrared images. His passion is to interpret nature, both pristine and altered by man, especially in the American Southwest. Increasingly, environmental concerns influence his work. In 2015, he was an artist-in-residence at Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico with his wife, Patricia Galagan. His work has been shown at the New Mexico Museum of Art and the San Diego Art Institute and is included in the photo archives of the New Mexico History Museum.

Patricia Galagan is a fine-art photographer based in Santa Fe whose work often concerns the aftermath of upheaval in the landscape. Her work was part of the 2015 Fire Season show at the New Mexico Museum of Art, which has also been shown at Fototeca de Cuba in Havana and at Fotografika Gallaery near Geneva, Switzerland. She was awarded a solo show at Blue Sky Gallery in Portland, Oregon, by Photollucida in 2014. With her husband, Philip Metcalf, she was an artist-in-residence at Bandelier National Monument in 2015.

About the Contributors
Craig D. Allen, Ph.D., is a research ecologist for the U.S. Geological Survey, specializing in ecosystem dynamics. He is the author of ninety-seven research publications, many about tree mortality, climate-change-related drought and stress in the landscape, and ecosystems in the mountain West. A current project is the “Western Mountain Initiative: Response of Western Mountain Ecosystems to Climatic Variability and Change.”

William deBuys is the author of eight books, including A Great Aridness: Climate Change and the Future of the American Southwest (Oxford, 2011) and, with Alex Harris, River of Traps: A New Mexico Mountain Life (New Mexico, 1990), a finalist for the Pulitzer Price in general non-fiction. An active conservationist, he has helped protect more than 150,000 acres in Arizona, New Mexico, and North Carolina.

Katherine Ware is Curator of Photography at the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe, where she organized the exhibition, book, and Website Earth Now: American Photographers and the Environment (Museum of New Mexico Press, 2011). She previously served as Curator of Photographs at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and as Assistant Curator in the Department of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum. She is a frequent juror and reviewer of contemporary photography and has written extensively on the art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Slide Show

Praise

“Philip Metcalf and Patricia Galagan’s Fire Ghosts is an ambitious and impressive book. The ambition is in the belief that two artists can combine their distinct sensibilities and visual styles to create one compelling narrative on a subject of timeless significance—the fiery death and sublime rebirth of a beloved American landscape in New Mexico. The impressive part is that they succeeded. When, in the future, visual artists consider collaborating, this is the book they will look to for inspiration.”
—Sam Abell, National Geographic photographer

“Tracing fire history through scars is an old practice. But these photos by Metcalf and Galagan record a fire that scarred not just trees but the spirit. Like the images of tiny shoots amid looming boles, the book also speaks to a long, uncertain process of change that may or may not be healing. Fire Ghosts is a gripping poster for the Pyrocene.”
—Stephen J. Pyne, author of Between Two Fires: A Fire History of Contemporary America

“Fire Ghosts is a thoughtful and insightful look at the aftermath of a major wildfire. Though we may tend to view such events as ‘destructive,’ in reality wildfires just change the landscape. The photos by Metcalf and Galagan are a testimony to the rejuvenating powers of Nature. More than that, these stunning images, reminiscent of Ansel Adam’s best work, capture the subtle and special beauty that comes to a forest restored to its simplest elements and help us appreciate the regenerative processes that maintain our ecosystems.”
—George Wuerthner, author of Wildfire: A Century of Failed Forest Policy

My Place

Some believe that we are imprinted from an early age to prefer the geography that surrounded us growing up. For Philip, that would be the verdant Finger Lakes area of central New York State and the island of Martha’s Vineyard off the coast of Massachusetts, where he spent summers with his family in a cottage just yards from the Atlantic Ocean. I, by age twelve, had lived in eight different states—some coastal, some inland—arriving at puberty with no discernible inclination to prefer oceans over mountains or farmland over cities. I was geography-neutral.

When we married, we put our formative influences aside and settled in Northern Virginia, handling muggy summers and black-ice winters with stoicism. The moisture made our garden abundant and raised it to garden-tour status. When a California developer bought the twelve acres behind our house and cut down and mulched the 200-year-old oaks that had been our borrowed view, replacing them with mini-mansions, we moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico. There, the piñon-polka-dot landscape blanketing ancient, worn-down mountains refreshed and energized our photography and our spirits. It was our immense pleasure to live with vast, open horizons, New Mexico’s curious flat-bottomed clouds, and its refulgent geology.

We live near the Rio Grande Rift, a tear in the North American crust, pulling western North America further westward for the past thirty million years. Near us are the Jemez Mountains, huge piles of rocks spewed by numerous volcanoes between seven and ten million years ago.

When the Las Conchas Fire of 2011 burned in the Jemez Mountains for thirty days and nights in plain sight from our living room, we realized that the ecological future of New Mexico would be warmer, drier, and increasingly fire-prone. We learned that burned forests, without moisture and tolerable temperatures, do not return to their previous state. We embarked on a seven-year photography project depicting the destruction and altered regrowth of 156,000 acres of burned forest. We tapped into a degree of shared environmental concern unimagined in other places we have lived or visited.

We now know there is no other place we want to live. New Mexico and much of the American Southwest is vast, still primal, geologically raw, and, for us, visually compelling in a way that is irresistible.

Copyright © 2019 Patricia Galagan. All rights reserved.