Cover Feature/Inside Story Shooting Fire’s ‘Natural Force’


Stuart Palley’s environmental photojournalism career follows a very natural cycle — it heats up (a lot) during the fire season. Many photographers chase wildfires across the West every


summer, especially as they become a bigger and more destructive player in global climate change. But in the last three years, Palley has set himself apart by developing a unique style that might best be described as nocturnal fire landscape photography. Rather than pursue his subject close to the flames on the fire- line, he will take in the entire fire scene from afar, sometimes miles away, to include the context of the fire as well as the fire. On clear nights, his pictures can include the Milky Way. The resulting images have drawn enormous attention to Pal-


ley’s work, from the Pictures of the Year International competition last year, where he was a finalist for the Environmental Vision Award, to most recently a July double-page spread in Wired. SEJournal photo editor Roger Archibald was able to catch up


with the 27-year-old southern California native in late July as he was — what else? — headed off to another fire, the Sand Fire in Southern California.


SEJournal: What do you know so far about the fire? Stuart Palley: Today is day four of the fire. It’s ten per cent contained, and that hasn’t changed since the first day. It’s currently at 35,000 acres, burning through heavily drought-impacted chap- arral, pine and desert scrub on the Angeles National Forest (about 35 miles northwest of downtown Los Angeles). It’s mostly burning on Forest Service land, but it’s been getting down in the flats and hitting structures in L.A. County. This fire’s been doing what it wants. The crews have been doing a great job of dealing with some really strange fire behavior, but at the end of the day, the fire’s been kicking everyone’s ass. It’s probably a fatality fire at this point, unfortunately, and we’ve


Remnants of the Erskine Fire near Kernville, Calif., last June where the 19,000-acre blaze destroyed an estimated 100 homes, and caused two fatalities. Photo: © Stuart Palley 10 SEJournal Fall 2016


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