In 2018 a tornado of fire, bigger than six football fields, swept through the Shasta district of Northern California. The Carr Fire destroyed more than 1,000 homes and killed six people within two hours.

I travelled to the area to document the aftermath of this destruction as part of my on-going response to the global impacts of climate change. In his process of making portraits of families whose homes had been obliterated I asked them to give me at least one significant object that had been retrieved from the ashes, and marked by fire.

I wanted to find a new, yet timeless way to respond to these objects and began a dialogue with my friend Jonathan Pierredon, a tintype photographer, whose creative method is based on using old tools to document the contemporary world.

These images are the result of this collaboration, with Jonathan bringing what could be the gaze of a nineteenth century explorer to these burnt relics of our climate emergency. The tintype process, dating back to the 1860s, brings a unique quality–a sense that these items could be the relics of a collapsed civilisation, seared by history.

As we start to experience the heat of the world’s climate emergency right here and right now, these objects pose the question of how archaeologists of the future might struggle to understand the self-destructive behaviour that is threatening our life and future on this planet.