// Edition 023 Burned

A climate change project made from the charred remains of a local common

It’s getting hotter.

I’ve sat here, wondering how to begin this newsletter. I was going to run through a list of places affected by increased heat and drought during the last two or three years, but there have been too many heat-related crises to name.

It’s affecting us all, even places traditionally thought of as water-logged, like the UK where I live. Whilst these are small compared to the scale of those seen during the same period in Europe, or indeed those seen in the US or Australia, they are symptomatic of the same thing: human-activity induced climate change that has in turn led to increased global temperatures and the havoc this is causing in nature. 

I became compelled to respond to it somehow through my photography and this came to a head around the same time as the web 3.0 craze around cryptocurrency and NFTs.

In my mind, there was suddenly a convergence of ideas:

• The local environmental issues caused by extreme weather

• The negative aspects of NFT technology, both in terms of preying on artists and photographers as well as the environmental cost of all that computing power.

• The false promise of attempting to sell an inherently reproducible medium as a one-off NFT or even the idea of editioning photographic prints for the art world. As long as the negative or digital file exists, the chance of making new prints will always be present.

• The role of photography – in responding to the environmental crisis but also as complicit in it: whether through mining of minerals to make cameras or the computing power required to make and store digital images; or the plastic, chemical and water waste created using film.

This led me to produce an installation work that is fully physical in nature and which I will not be sharing as individual digital pieces. It can also never be reproduced. It is called Burned 3.0.

During the spring and early summer of 2020, those hot days during the first pandemic lockdown, a wildfire burned 150 hectares of the largest remaining biodiverse heathland in Surrey, Thursley Common.

Walking around the common a year later, I carefully studied the charred trees and heather, photographing from various angles and in different lighting.

As I continued photographing the ruins of Thursley Common, more local commons burned and even parts of London became engulfed in flames, burning homes and forcing people to flee fire and smoke. The UK then experienced its hottest day ever on record, 40.2°C. Each year sees heat-related records broken.

On reviewing the images from Thursley, one in particular stood out to me: a blackened, scarred trunk with a deep gouge in it. I concentrated on this one, working with it to produce the final pieces that I felt could encapsulate my ideas:

1. Three photographic prints of this burned tree, made on fibre paper in the darkroom from a single film negative, consisting of one selenium-toned archival print, one solarised print exposed to the sun before fixing, and one print that was partially burned after printing

2. Two contact sheets of the film roll the negative came from made on resin coasted paper in the darkroom, one with the negative cut out

3. A jar containing ash from the burned print

4. The destroyed negative, hole-punched and burned, that the prints were made from

Burned 3.0 pieces ready for installation

I originally debuted this work in October last year, but have since refined it. Burned 3.0 is now installed at Kiln Photo this October to coincide with members’ participation in Farnham Craft Month, which celebrates Farnham’s status as a World Craft Town.

Please do come along, directions and opening times, can be found on the Kiln Photo website.

I’d love to know what you think of the concept and this work and do hope you’ll be able to come and see the installation in person. If you have any suggestions for other places that might be interested in this work, please let me know.

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// Poll results

Thank you to everyone who responded to my poll on future newsletter content. There was a pretty even split across all the categories, so I’ll be taking that into consideration for future issues. I’m not sure that means more content or more newsletters, but perhaps more variation in content.

With that in mind, I hope you enjoyed a bit of a deeper dive into some of my work in this one.

I’ve also been doing some research, looking at which of my newsletters have been most well-received but also on newsletters in general. This is with the goal of tying things in more nicely to the work I’m doing now and am formulating for the future.

Thankfully there’s plenty of great newsletter examples out there to read. Craig Mod has also been very open about the how and why of putting together his regular and pop-up newsletters.

I hope you continue to enjoy my newsletters, and if you know of anyone else who might, do please share this newsletter to them.

Sincerely,

Ed

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I was not paid for any content in this newsletter.

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Thank you!