Portfolio: Backburn, Embers, and Aftermath

Wildfires can move twenty-five miles and burn hundreds of square miles in a day. Fire tornados can push winds in excess of one hundred forty miles per hour. In a world of megafires and twelve-month fire seasons, subtlety seems an unlikely characteristic of today’s wildfires, but that’s only for those not paying attention. And photographer Stuart Palley is paying attention.

The Southern California native is drawn to the big flames, of course—who wouldn’t be?—but after nearly a decade of chasing blazes around the West, he’s become more sharply attuned to the nuanced dynamics of fires: to the way they shift light throughout the day, to the cleanup afterward, to the quieter moments. As he puts it, “It’s not always about the tanker overhead.”

Palley was five in 1993, but he still remembers the Laguna Beach fire that destroyed four hundred homes and caused a half-billion dollars in damage a few miles from his hometown of Newport Beach. During