On Fire, 2010 - 2016

From 2010 to 2017, Balog photographed fourteen active wildfires and/or their aftermath. One of the fires, Colorado’s Four-Mile Canyon Fire in 2010, came within a mile of burning his own home (the fire torched 6,181 acres and destroyed 162 homes). Balog and his team trained to be wildland firefighters, skills which allowed them to work with a reasonable degree of safety. In 2016, they produced extensive coverage of the Soberanes Fire, south of Carmel, California. Other projects sought to engage with the sculptural, mythic, and transformative character of fire. He created studies of flames outdoors in the Rocky Mountains and at the U.S. Forest Service’s Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory in Montana, using black-and-white infrared cameras as well as conventional color cameras.