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During the Labor Day fires in 2020, the photographer and writer Will Matsuda drove down I-5 toward the blaze. “I couldn’t bear to sit in my smoky living room and doomscroll any longer,” he told me. The AQI was over 500. Wearing a respirator and struggling to breathe, he stopped in Tualatin and took a photo. Lush green leaves flicker against a burnt orange sky in Tualatin, 2020, part of his series Shrine, which opens at KAMP Gallery Thursday, November 14 (6–9pm; 2316 NE Oregon St). Matsuda saw an apocalypse, but everyone he shared the photo with said it was beautiful. The response, he thought, “indicated a lack of awareness or care about our burning world.” But eventually he saw an opportunity in this confusing beauty: The contradiction could set the tone for a photo series made in the areas surrounding Portland to interrogate the alluring, extraordinary scenes of climate change in plain view. “Beauty is a useful tool to bring an audience into the fight,” he said, before talking me through the project. 

Matthew Trueherz: Why ground a global project with a narrow setting?

Will Matsuda: I have lived in Portland for most of my life. I remember how this place looked when I was a kid, and I can compare it to what it looks like now, which is hotter, smokier, and drier. This landscape shapes my life and my politics. I hope that is communicated in the photos. I love these places that I photograph. It is often more than love, too. It is a spiritual engagement. 

I also know that this project has been more legible to people here than to East Coast audiences. But I think that’s changing. New York’s skies are turning orange more often since I started this project. Brooklyn’s Prospect Park burned this week. 

You mention Japanese woodblock prints as an inspiration in the show’s press release, which subverts how I think most people understand photography. Is this a metaphor to say that photography, as a medium, is just as malleable as painting, drawing, or printmaking?

Photographs can be complete constructions and clear reflections of reality. They can be both at the same time, much like literature. My favorite books are fiction, yet they describe the world precisely in ways nonfiction and journalism can’t. I know my photographs are working not because of how they look, or their “truthfulness,” but because of how they feel. The photograph, as a technology, is a powerful storytelling tool because of the widespread belief that it tells the truth, but photographs have lied since their invention.

I am not using Japanese woodblock prints metaphorically—I am often drawing on specific pieces and artists for inspiration and guidance, like Hasui Kawase, through formal composition or gradients of rich color. It is a more direct engagement than metaphor. As a Japanese American photographer, I am more interested in drawing from this canon and other Japanese photographers, Rinko Kawauchi and Lieko Shiga, than a Western photographic canon.  

Facing the confusing beauty of climate change images, you turned toward seeking out, instead of beautiful, sublime images. I read this in the Platonic—overwhelming and incomprehensible mix of fear and attraction—sense of “the sublime.” Working in a medium with a counterintuitively flexible relationship to material reality, how do you view your role in communicating climate change through your work?

Attempting to create a sublime image in the context of climate change is an act of hope. I could make images full of despair, but that’s not what I am doing. It demonstrates a belief in the world and the necessity to fight for it.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

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