Community Ensembles

Artist Statement

Fire Stories is a distillation of nearly thirty years of work by John F Marshall, starting in the early 1990s melded with historic photography from the 1930s. Art, Science, and History converge around a topic that matters to all who live in the American West. Whether by flame or smoke from distant fires we are all affected. Celebrating the beauty of nature through photography is satisfying by itself, but the conservation of nature requires more than appreciation. Landscapes change over time, and forests cannot be understood at a glance. Fire, as the great destroyer, can also bring about new beauty and life. Much has to do with scale and intensity.

In the wake of large wildfires on the Wenatchee National Forest in 1994, Marshall began documenting landscapes through photo points – a project later joined by the U.S. Forest Service. The photo points work led to working with the Osborne Panoramas; 120-degree large format photographs taken in the 1930s from fire lookout towers. Marshall has replicated panoramas from more than 75 sites spread over ten National Forests, in Oregon and Washington. From the many pairings of panoramas, twelve to fifteen will be put on display, along with other images of the broader fire ecology story.

Marshall’s first wildfire exhibit was shown in 2015 at Wenatchee Valley Museum, under the title of Wildfires and Us. Since that time, with the sponsorship of Wallowa Resources, Marshall expanded his repertoire into the Blue and Wallowa Mountains region and with the help of Dr. Hessburg formulated Fire Stories first shown at Whitman College’s Sheehan Gallery in 2019. The exhibit has since been shown at the Josephy Art Center in Joseph, Oregon.