The short video below provides further context for the Dixie fire and its aftermath.
Requiem: The Remains of the Day | Video on Vimeo by Whirlwind Creative, Inc.
View: vimeo.com/816386064
On August 4, 2021, at approximately 7:30 PM the Dixie Fire had already ravaged the ancient Sierra forest landscape and would soon crest the Sierra Nevada Mountain Range and roar through the small town of Greenville, CA. In less than 45 minutes it destroyed wooden buildings that had stood for over a century. A gas station, church, hotel, museum, and bar were among the structures gutted, along with nearly 100 family homes, schools, and commercial businesses. The homes and property of approximately 1000 residents were reduced to rubble, fortunately, all the residents were evacuated.
The Dixie Fire, which began on July 13, 2021, burned nearly 1 million acres before being contained on October 25, 2021, making it the single largest wildfire in recorded California history.
Ruth Morgan’s Requiem: Remains of the Day puts us at the center of this devastation. Through large-scale photographs, Morgan presents us with Greenville’s charred and desolate landscape making it impossible to escape the magnitude of this historic fire. These images at times haunting also envelop us in a quietness only felt after a destructive force has come and gone—it is in this quietness that Morgan’s images find their power and create a space for remembrance, reflection, and deep reckoning.
On October 1, 2021, photographer Ruth Morgan drove out to Greenville with the intention of photographing and interviewing residents who had been displaced but instead found herself in a town devoid of people with only the remains of the day to tell the story. Morgan documented these remains, her photographs now part of this requiem, depict the ravages of a fire so intense that metal lamp posts involuntarily twisted and melted to the ground. These images capture the tangled destruction and loss of a tight-knit community, from scorched vehicles to blackened clay pots to the lone standing chimneys, these remains speak to lives interrupted by a sudden fiery force.
The destructive magnitude of the Dixie Fire is evident in Morgan’s photographs, but more than capturing the visible ruins, these images bring to light the more invisible yet sinister forces of climate change. As these photographs bring into focus the real impacts of the climate crisis, we are forced to reckon with our collective existential crisis—what can we change, and what should we do to alleviate the ongoing climate crisis?
Requiem: Remains of the Day demands of us an insistence and immediacy in addressing the monumental climate crisis we are in. Morgan focused her lens on the tangible destruction of Greenville at the hands of the largest wildfire in recorded California history, but more than that, she captured a foreboding sense of the catastrophic impact climate change will continue to have on us and our natural world if we don’t step up and save each other.
— Roberto Martinez, Curator and Exhibitions Director, Richmond Art Center
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Requiem: The Remains of the Day, August 4, 2021 was on view at the Richmond Art Center from April 5–June 3, 2023. richmondartcenter.org/exhibitions/requiem