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Image Credit: Jay Janner AMERICAN-STATESMAN

Since this past Sunday the local wildfires have been a dominant force in the Texas media. Over 1,000 homes and 35,000 acres were destroyed in the Bastrop area alone, and while the Bastrop fire has been contained there are more and more reports of fires springing up north of Houston and throughout East Texas.  It would be a mistake, though, to consider this rash of wildfires an isolated event. As the months long drought has continued wildfires have been nervously anticipated alongside cracked foundations and the flooding a serious rain could bring. The images that surround this disaster carry with them that sense of inevitability. The standard series of disaster photos, though, cast confusion around the event—by forcing the fires into a basic linear narrative we are given the impression that things have settled down even as dozens of blazes continue to advance. 

This photo, from Monday the 5th showcases the kind of impending doom that the fire offers. Huge plumes of smoke obscure the horizon and sky as it moves through the trees and brush. Online galleries covering the disaster are full of these smoke-on-the-horizon photos.  The Austin American-Statesman has galleries for both user-submitted and professional photographs that contain an organized record of the events. These photos, though, betray the nonlinearity of the fires. They advance a notion of impending danger while hiding the current and previous destruction that the fires cause. 

As regular consumers of disaster photos we have come to expect a linear progression in our imagery. Disasters either begin suddenly and thus burst onto the scene immediately, or they are tracked as they advance. In the latter case the disaster is visible before the fact; people anxiously await landfall. There is a striking similarity between images of hurricanes as they descend on a coast and the smoke covered horizons of the Texas photos. Tracking maps featured on sites like Weather Underground (a fire map and ahurricane map) highlight these differences.

Once the disaster strikes we are greeted with images of its initial impact—the disaster in action, videos and pictures of broad destruction as it occurs. The earthquake and subsequent tsunami that struck Japan earlier this year were accompanied by a huge number of these images. Then, most commonly, the secondary after effects and destruction are captured—buildings and trees laid flat, piles of debris, stranded animals and people. Finally we see cleanup, rescue and reconstruction. 

Image Credit: Eric Gay ASSOCIATED PRESS via HOUSTON CHRONICLE

These before and after shots of the smiling water tower near Bastrop (which, it should be noted, have been taken by two different photographers. The after-shot, as an AP image, has been much more widely circulated.) act as the classic before and after of the disaster. They tell its story in two shots through familiar themes in children’s movies. The little tower that could was blithely unaware of the horror about to engulf him, but through pluck and determination he has emerged unscathed and still smiling. But this truncated linearity can only be plucked out of the deluge of images after the fact. It has not been so easily formed as in standard disaster narratives.

Video credit: Texas Parks and Wildlife

Because of how the fires move through the environment they create heterogeneous activity across the affected area. This results in the jumbled picture of the disaster that has been displayed so far. Even on the first day of the fires there were images of impending disaster, destruction and after effects. Alan Taylor collected a wonderful set of images in his blog In Focus that show this kind of jumble. The Austin American-Statesman’s photo gallery, arranged in a chunky chronology, is also a great example of this. 

There is a tension at play here, though. As the central Texas fires are contained we are presented with more and more standard clean up photos. Disaster images demand a resolution. While fires continue to burn throughout Texas we are on the recovery phase of the narrative. Initially what was considered a single, widespread event is broken down into a set of linear narratives.