Photography Has Gotten Climate Change Wrong from the Start
Smoggy-looking daguerreotypes in 19th-century London foreshadowed today’s muted smartphone photos of California fires.
I knew something was wrong the minute I woke up. On September 9, the sky was still dark at 7:15 a.m. Eventually it revealed a deep-orange light, darker and dustier than any sunset. After a dry lightning storm in late August had sparked more than 900 fires around California, high-altitude smoke hung over the San Francisco Bay Area. I took a photo out the window with my iPhone. It wasn’t right. I tried again, tapping the screen and dragging the exposure slider down. Still, the tawny orange of the sky didn’t register.
The iPhone rendered it a pale yellow, the foreboding automatically corrected by the camera’s built-in software. Manually fiddling with the controls, I darkened a few images and increased the warmth. Then I watched as
