The Heat (just the beginning)
I'm writing this on the hottest day of this heat wave. I think heat needs to be documented, but it hasn't been something I've done so far. That said, I can share an attempt from one year ago.
In Jane Eyre, when Rochester first goes through Jane's paintings, his first question is, "Who taught you to paint wind?" This is one of my favorite sentences in all literature, despite the obvious synesthesia.
Photographers – well, I don't know about all photographers – will want to depict this synesthesia. We want to give you more of reality than a copy of the colors and shapes that send the photons onto the film or the camera's sensor. To make this simple, we don't simply want you to see what the scene looks like; we also want you to feel how the scene feels.
Now we arrive at the theme of photographing heat. (Painting wind is probably more difficult and time-consuming.) I'm writing this on what is hopefully the hottest day of this heat wave in Budapest. This heat wave comes with extreme temperatures, well over 40℃ (or 104℉), and with never before seen draught. Rivers going extreme low, other bodies of water almost disappearing, crops failing. And we know that at least part of this is humankind's own doing – or, most precisely, the consequence of what the most powerful and wealthy among us failed to do.
I haven't documented this heat wave. I probably should have. But I fear there will be plenty of opportunity in the coming months and years.
However, I did remember that, almost exactly one year ago, I took photos of the heat at the northern end of Lago di Como. I was astonished by how visible the heat was, although I'm not sure I was fully aware of that at the time.
What makes heat visible? You see, I can babble away about conveying the feeling through a photo, but in the end, it's "only" an ensemble of colors and shapes that get translated into the semblance of something more.
Look at the first seven photos below. You will see that the sun is very strong and sits high up in the sky; there is extreme reflection on the water surface; the air is hazy, we only see the contours of the mountains on the other side; and there is an eerie calm on these pictures.
It's the middle of the day. The light was so bright and hard that I was never going to take these photos with automatic settings. Instead, I had to introduce artificial night. In manual mode, you select an extremely short exposure time paired with a very small aperture, regardless of what the meter says. That will result in a photo where the sources of light, including the sun, are well discernible; and everything else is reduced to shadows and controls, as if they burned up.
There are two outliers in this set. The 8th photo of a jar of raspberry lemonade in front of a sunlit window, where the incoming sunlight, the dirt on the glass and the camera lens create a flare to the left of the jar. This one was taken using an iPhone.
The last photo was taken in July 1993 in Palmyra, Syria. It's early in the morning; the temperature has only just reached 40℃, or so I think. This one was taken on film using a very simple automatic Kodak camera. I was told that the scene I was photographing here no longer exists. It also shows what our country will become if we don't take better care of the climate.
