Crescent Camp Number One, Timber Views Co., Seattle

Darius Kinsey

1936

A gelatin silver photograph that records a 1936 clearcut and controlled burn in the Pacific Northwest, made to confront the scale of industrially altered landscape.

You’re struck by the stark drama—the foreground’s raked, serrated mounds of logging debris rising to a dark band of standing trees from which thick plumes of smoke billow against a brooding sky, giving the scene an almost elemental, monumental intensity.

Placed within documentary photography, the image links striking formal composition to early visual arguments about industrial logging’s environmental impact, helping shape later conversations about conservation and the photographic depiction of human-altered nature.

Palette

Art Terms

Gelatin silverprint (developing-out paper) Photography Documentary photography Landscape Industrialization

Exhibitions

New Photography 2: Philip Lorca di Corcia, Mary Frey, and David Hanson

1986

Sixty Photographs: A Survey of Camera Esthetics

1940

Photographs of the Civil War and the American Frontier

1942

The Photographer and the American Landscape

1963