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Matinee: 'Capturing The Fire'
16 July 2022
Saturday matinees long ago let us escape from the ordinary world to the island of the Swiss Family Robinson or the mutinous decks of the Bounty. Why not, we thought, escape the usual fare here with Saturday matinees of our favorite photography films?
So we're pleased to present the 457th in our series of Saturday matinees today: Capturing The Fire.
This 7:37 video by Samantha Marlowe documents four hours in the life of Australian photographer Louise Coghill during which everything changed.
Coghill, who tells the story in her own words, saw a plume of smoke rising behind her parents' property in Western Australian town of Gidgegannup. Four hours later she had jumped into the home's pool to avoid the flames engulfing the property.
She had taken her camera into the pool with her, determined to keep shooting as the bush fire destroyed the building.
Coghill drives us back to the property long after the fire was extinguished, the first time she had returned since the building was demolished.
She knew she had to photograph this.
She points out the hill where she first saw smoke. Her parents, she says, wanted to stay to protect the house. Coghill wasn't going to leave without them. So she started taking photos, which we see as she tells the story.
She's taken a lot of risks with her photography but this one topped them all.
She was on the roof where her father threw her a hose to run water into the gutters. When she saw the bombers coming, her hopes were buoyed and she kept hoping the fire would turn aside or the wind would change direction.
But she felt weak in the knees when she saw a wall of flames burning steadily toward the house. They weren't going to escape.
She knew she had to photograph this.
"Looking out the window it was just flames," she says. Her mother said it was on the roof. They went out the front door. "It just hurt to breathe."
She kept shooting despite the panic. There was nowhere to go. "This is it," she says.
Both she and her mother went into the pool. In a few minutes everything was burning. It was terrifying but she needed to keep shooting, she says.
"This is a place that mattered to us," she says.
It didn't survive the fire, but she and her parents did. They were rescued by a volunteer firefighter.
Along with these stunning images.