What Happens When Art Makes Disaster Visually Compelling?

What I first thought was Sahara sand in the sky over Palamós seemed like a fascinating source of colour and atmosphere for my photography. Until I realised that the unusual sky was caused by a nearby wildfire.

by Dani Kiwi

Jul 30, 2026

On July 4, 2026, an unfamiliar ochre-red color spread across the sky above Palamós on the Costa Brava in Spain. I thought Sahara dust was coloring the sky. It simply looked fascinating, so I grabbed my camera and went out.

The strange color transformed the town, the beach, and the harbor. I had already made several photographs when I noticed an aircraft. Soon, more aircraft crossed the sky, and it became obvious that they were firefighting planes and that a major fire was burning inland.

Later reports confirmed the extent of the Gavarres wildfire: around 2,200 hectares had been affected, almost all within the protected natural area. The fire was not declared under control until July 7, after several days of intensive work.

I don’t document — I create atmosphere

I am not a documentary photographer. Through intentional camera movement, exposure time, and repetition, I transform what I encounter into shifted forms, color, rhythm, and atmosphere. At that moment, I felt uncomfortable turning a real threat to people and animals, as well as the destruction of a natural landscape, into photographic art.

Documentary photographs can communicate the fire directly. They can show the flames, the emergency response, and the burned landscape. My images do not provide that kind of evidence; they are photographic artworks intended to be lived with.

On the other hand, I felt that I should do something with what I had witnessed. Could photographs made in my visual language help raise awareness of the growing danger of wildfires and its connection to climate change?

International and regional organizations are drawing attention to this growing threat. The European Environment Agency in Copenhagen reports that climate change is increasing fire danger across Europe and that longer fire seasons and an expansion of fire-prone areas are expected. The IPCC identifies wildfire as one of the key climate risks facing the Mediterranean region.

Can we live with visually compelling images of climate danger?

A contemporary example comes close to my question. German-Italian artist Rosa Barba, Professor of Art in Space and Time at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, works across film, sculpture, and installation, often connecting art, science, landscape, and ecological questions. Her film installation Aggregate States of Matters (2019), presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from 2024 to 2025, explores how visual expression can communicate the environmental and social effects of climate change without following journalistic conventions.

But I had not set out that morning to create work about wildfire danger or climate change. I reacted spontaneously because the sky looked visually fascinating. For that reason, I do not want to reinterpret these photographs as though they had been created to raise awareness of climate change.

Disaster entered the images before I knew it

And yet the wildfire had already entered the images before I fully understood what I was photographing. In a way, they had taken on a meaning before I had consciously chosen one. Had I begun with the intention of addressing wildfire danger, I would have looked for it.

Without the context of the wildfire, however, the images may suggest something more universal: how the beauty and familiarity of everyday life coexist with fragility — and how the possibility of disaster is always present. Once that context is known, this possibility becomes concrete, and the images may help raise awareness of wildfire danger and its connection to climate change.

This leaves open the question of how much context is needed to understand the subject — and how visually compelling our representations of danger and disaster should be. Honestly, these photographs have drawn me into a debate about intention, intuition, context, and artistic transformation.

At the heart of my photographic art is the tension between the familiar and the unknown, between reality and vision, expressed through structure and movement. As an explorer by nature, I generally go out prepared, but I always remain open to whatever may unexpectedly enter the work.