Maxime Riché
Maxime Riché
Paradise
128 pages
24 x 30 cm
65 colour pictures
Published by André Frère
2024
About the Book:
Camp Fire stands as the costliest and deadliest wildfire in the history of the United States, with damages totaling 10.8 billion dollars. It obliterated 18,800 structures within hours, claimed the lives of 86 individuals, and indirectly impacted over 50 others. This catastrophe pushed numerous residents of the town to the brink of destitution, a situation that many continue to endure today.
In 2020, the North Complex Fire ignited just a few miles from Paradise, triggered by a thunderstorm. Among the nearly 10,000 wildfires that ravaged California that year, this one emerged as the largest, engulfing 400,000 hectares of land and introducing a new classification: the gigafire.
On July 13, 2021, the Dixie Fire, categorized as a megafire, erupted in the hills surrounding Paradise, in close proximity to the same power lines that had been implicated in 2018. Fortunately, this time, opposing winds pushed the flames away from the city. Over the course of more than 100 days of uncontrolled activity, the Dixie Fire devoured an area three times the size of San Francisco (390,000 hectares). It exhibited such intensity that it could create its own weather patterns and, to this day, holds the distinction of being the largest wildfire in California’s history. “Photography harbors the unique power to reveal the unseen, yet it is limited in its ability to show what lies beyond direct sight, such as the smell of smoke or the lingering heat, which have profoundly scarred the megafire survivors.
To sensitively transcribe the emotions of these individuals and the images that haunt them, I sporadically use infrared slide film when shooting in analog. Its fiery tones serve as flashbacks of the hell they went through, conjuring up memories of flames etched onto their retinas. These hallucinatory visions punctuate the fragile reality they are trying to rebuild.”
Maxime Riché, excerpt.
Book review by Max Cavitch |
Much of the best contemporary fine art environmental photography is focused on climate change and ecological spoliation and collapse. Edward Burtynsky, Andreas Gursky, Arati Kumar-Rao, Stuart Palley, Sebastião Salgado, and others continue to set high standards for the dramatic portrayal of some of the world’s most damaged regions and imperiled populations. Ironically, the astonishing beauty of some of these photographs derives from the degradation and destruction they seek to expose and curtail. The spectacular pyrotechnics of Palley’s wildfire images, Burtynsky’s breathtaking, quasi-abstract photographs of sawmills and mineral tailings, and the sumptuous palette and textures of Gursky’s scenes of global capitalism risk undermining their social impact with sheer aesthetic delight.
According to the wonderfully perverse Slovenian Marxist philosopher, Slavoj Žižek, this is exactly how it should be. A “true ecologist,” says Žižek in one of his YouTube videos, loves the world, and to love anyone or anything means loving everything about them that is imperfect, flawed, and ugly. Žižek delivers this junkyard sermon with more than a little tongue in cheek. But he’s also making a serious point about the rapidly shifting, unequally shared conditions of life on Planet Dump. Efforts to mobilize governments and large numbers of people in the name of saving this planet from toxic pollutants and the destructive effects of climate change consistently fail. What’s left but to try to forge new forms of subjectivity and solidarity amidst the wreckage? Can we truly love a world that we’re destroying?
When fire ravaged 150,000 acres in Northern California, as it did in 2018, most of us still called it a “natural disaster,” either believing or pretending to believe that it was somehow inevitable and “couldn’t be helped.” But catastrophic fires like the one that leveled the California town of Paradise—whence the title of Maxime Riché’s new book of photographs, Paradise—are no more “natural” than the smouldering trash-heaps of eastern Nairobi or the smoking riverside ghats of Varanasi. Anthropogenic ignitions and increased environmental flammability now account for more than half of the megafire and gigafire “regimes” in North America, Europe, the Mediterranean, Australasia, and other regions of the world. The 2018 Camp Fire that destroyed Paradise—the deadliest and most destructive in the history of California before the 2021 Dixie Fire—was ignited by a faulty power transmission line and exacerbated by abnormally hot and dry conditions characteristic of anthropogenic climate change.
Satellite photo of Camp Fire, November 8, 2018. By evening, the fast-moving fire had charred around 18,000 acres, including Paradise. Photo: NASA, Joshua Stevens.
Having spent much of the previous decade working on the project “Climate Heroes” and its accompanying volume, Riché made two trips to Paradise, in 2020 and 2021, to witness the efforts of that town’s everyday heroes to reclaim it—and themselves—from what had been laid waste. Riché created photographs of the town and its survivors in a style he refers to as “documentaire spéculatif [speculative documentary]—part record of the present, part effort to imagine the interior lives of traumatized inhabitants, and part “forward-looking reflection, oriented towards potential futures” (Riché, Paradise, n.p.). Indeed, his chief concern in Paradise—a bilingual volume in French and English—is with the consequences of the fire for the people of the town and their efforts to regenerate their lives. By the time Riché first visits Paradise, new houses are already being built, vegetation is returning, and soil reclamation is well underway (megafires liquify all sorts of toxic materials that leech into the ground).
Maxime Riché, a portrait from Paradise: “Carrie Max sur le terrain où se trouvait sa maison avant l’incendie…Juillet 2021/Carrie Max on the site of her house which was lost in the fire…July 2021.”
The photographs in Paradise alternate between peopleless landscapes, peopled landscapes, and more intimate portraits and are occasionally punctuated by handwritten notes from town residents. Looking at some of these vividly colored images, one could almost forget that, less than two years earlier, everything had been rubble and ashes. In addition to the book itself, Riché produced several kinds of limited prints and unique pieces for collectors and institutions using two distinctive processes. Some of these were printed on rare reserves of Cibachrome paper, the manufacture of which was discontinued along with its associated chemistry in 2013. This all-but-disappeared paper stock not only seemed appropriate for a project on a town’s disappearance but was also especially well-suited to Riché’s infrared Kodak Aerochrome film, helping to accentuate its vivid red and gold hues. Riché explains:
to capture the emotions of the survivors and the images that haunt them, I have intermittently used infrared transparency film. Its fiery hues, like flashbacks of the hell they endured, evoke the flames engraved in their memories. Like hallucinations, these images punctuate the precarious normality of the lives they are trying to rebuild. (Riché, Paradise, n.p.)
Maxime Riché, Cibachrome print from Paradise: “La maison de Tina Balasek sur un terrain nouvellement acquis suite à Camp Fire…Août 2021/Tina Balasek’s house on a newly acquired plot following the Camp Fire…August 2021.”
The other unconventional images were made using an artisanal process invented by Riché in collaboration with Paris’s Maison Pictorale. This “resinotype” process is based on gelatin pigment printing and makes use of natural pigments printed layer-by-layer. The final layer they applied was the black pigment, specially fabricated, according to Riché, using “the pine ashes I collected in Paradise, mixed with pine resin…present[ing] the ashes from Paradise directly to the viewer at the surface of the print” (Riché, personal communication, August 15, 2024).
Maxime Riché, Resinotype print from Paradise: “Feather River Canyon, durant les premiers jours de Dixie Fire, devenu le plus grand incendie unitaire de Californie en brulant 390000 hectares, soit trois fois la surface de San Francisco. Juillet 2021/ Feather River Canyon during the early days of the Dixie Fire, which became California’s largest single wildfire, burning 964,000 acres—an area three times the size of San Francisco. July 2021.”
Like Riché, many recent and contemporary artists have used ashes—human and animal cremains as well as ashes from many other kinds of combusted materials—as ars materiae in order to suggest various experiences of what sociologist Avery Gordon has called “haunting.” For Gordon, haunting is less about immediate traces of dead people or dead towns and more about the many ways in which “social ensembles” experience certain kinds of “haunting” sociopolitical-psychological states:
Haunting is a frightening experience. It always registers the harm inflicted or the loss sustained…But haunting, unlike trauma, is distinctive for producing a something-to-be-done. Indeed, it seemed to me that haunting was precisely the domain of turmoil and trouble, that moment (of however long duration) when things are not in their assigned places, when the cracks and rigging are exposed, when the people who are meant to be invisible show up without any sign of leaving, when disturbed feelings cannot be put away, when something else, something different from before, seems like it must be done. (Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008], xvi)
The ash-infused resinotype prints in Riché’s Paradise, like other diverse works of ash-based art, constitute one of the realms in which Gordon’s “something-to-be-done” gets produced, displayed, and experienced by viewers as “something different from before.” Riché’s environmental photography differs both in its employment of singular techniques and in its hopeful emphasis on what might remain to be done—at least locally.
The problem is that nothing is merely “local” anymore. There’s no way to ensure the future safety of a rebuilt Paradise in a state where, in 2024 alone, there have been over 8000 wildfires. One of Riché’s Cibachrome images captures this somber irony. It features a Coldwell Banker real estate billboard, surrounded by fire-hued foliage and bearing the announcement, “Still Selling Paradise!” It might as well read, desperately, “Capitalism Is Alive and Well!” After all, the point of capitalism and the “paradise” to which it aspires is to make as many different kinds of things for people to buy as possible—while ultimately producing only one thing: waste. And we’re long past being able to contain and hide that waste, even in the richest countries, where, for example, the bodies of one-percenters and ninety-nine-percenters alike are saturated with micro-plastics, surrounded by rising and polluted oceans, and, like the rich and poor residents of Paradise, frequently forced to watch their homes, be they magnificent or modest, burn in unprecedented, largely anthropogenic wildfires.
Maxime Riché, Cibachrome print from Paradise: “Panneau publicitaire le long de Skyway à l’approche de Chico, la ville principale des environs. Pour un grand nombre d’habitants, revenir vivre à Paradise n’est simple ni financièrement, ni émotionnellement, Février 2020./A billboard along Skyway outside Chico, the area’s main City. For many residents, returning to live in Paradise presents financial and emotional challenges. February 2020.”
In addition to the ashes of Paradise materially embedded in some of Riché’s prints, there is a kind of overdetermined nostalgia (for a paradise lost?) baked into his choice of depleted (Cibachrome), rare and difficult to use (false-color infrared emulsion), and artisanal (Resinotype) products and processes. It’s difficult to tell exactly what is being reclaimed: resources that would otherwise go to waste? lost analog techniques? a pre-capitalist guild economy? a more hopeful, humanistic aesthetics? In any case, Riché’s Paradise prompts retrospective as well as prospective thoughts and questions that are no longer commonly addressed in the heavily digitized and increasingly AI-enhanced world of fine art photography. As we watch the world burn, on what terms, aesthetic or otherwise, can we any longer envision a paradise regained?
