This body of work was made on Kīlauea, on the Island of Hawaii, during a single night of lava fountaining in December 2025.

The project has its origin in 2022, when I first saw Fire of Love and The Fire Within: A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft — two documentaries about the French volcanologists and filmmakers Katia and Maurice Krafft, who spent their lives studying, photographing and filming active volcanoes, and who were killed by a pyroclastic flow at Mount Unzen, Japan, on June 3, 1991. I returned to both films more than once. What the Kraffts offered me was not an idea about danger but an idea about devotion — to each other, to the earth, and to a form of looking that required them to cross, again and again, the line most people understand as the limit of a life. They knew an eruption could kill them. They kept going back, because once they had stood in front of one, ordinary life began to feel like a kind of narrowing. To me they are heroes of that refusal: people who chose beauty over safety, and who never stopped pursuing what they loved.

River of Fire was made in response to that refusal. In 2025 I traveled alone to the Big Island, where Kīlauea had been erupting episodically from two vents inside Halemaʻumaʻu crater since December 23, 2024. Each episode lasts only a few hours, and the forecast window is measured in days rather than hours: the eruption is regular enough to plan around, and unpredictable enough that planning barely helps. In this sense, the project is also a work about timing — about whether a photographer can arrive at the rim of a crater during the narrow interval in which the earth is making an image of itself.

All of the photographs in the series were taken from Kīlauea Overlook, on the night of December 23–24, 2025, during episode 39 of the ongoing eruption — which, by coincidence, marked the one-year anniversary of the episodic cycle. I was present from 11:30 p.m. to 2:30 a.m., during the final three hours of what turned out to be a roughly six-hour episode. The night was cold and lightly raining. I worked handheld on a Nikon F3 with CineStill 800T and Kodak Portra 800 — fast 35mm film rather than the large format I more often use. The decision was deliberate: the Kraffts carried 16mm cine cameras into places a view camera could never reach, and I wanted to photograph the eruption at the tempo at which a person actually stands in front of it.

The negatives are unprinted; the images shown here are scans. River of Fire is currently taking shape as a series of photobooks, in which these photographs are set alongside pastel drawings of volcanoes made before and after the journey.