Blaze by Sydney-based photographer and filmmaker Murray Fredericks was produced in 2022–23 at multiple sites across the Menindee lakes system on the Darling–Baaka River in New South Wales, Australia, where brief, controlled flames turn dead trees into temporary fire sculptures that register ecological history.
The Menindee lakes’ skeletal forests date to the 1960s, when dams flooded once-living stands and left trunks standing in altered waterlines. Fredericks returns to that engineered aftermath in the shadow of more recent crises: the prolonged smoke haze that settled over Sydney during the 2019–20 bushfires, and the oscillations of wet and dry that characterize Australian hydrology. As La Niña rainfall refilled the system, water returned to places that are typically dry, while the skeletal trees persisted as the dams’ most visible legacy. Introduced into this altered terrain, fire takes on several roles at once: a tool of rural land management, a force embedded in Indigenous relationships to Country, and a reminder shaped by the lived reality of bushfire.
Fredericks’ images are structured by repetition and restraint. Trees are typically isolated against an unbroken horizon set low in the frame, a compositional decision that holds attention on light, water, and distance rather than on landmarks. The dead trunks read as fixed armatures; the flames introduce a rapidly changing line that curls, forks, and briefly redraws the tree’s outline. Working in vivid color, he stages a dialogue between cool atmospheric light—often at dawn or dusk—and the warm, concentrated luminosity of ignition. Reflections in still water double the event, sometimes making the blaze appear to rise from the lake itself, and pushing the scene toward abstraction without abandoning its specific site.
A defining parameter of the project was that it must be strictly non-destructive, as even dead trees remain vital habitats for local wildlife. To ensure this, each ignition lasted only 15 to 20 seconds—long enough for the camera exposure but short enough to avoid permanent damage to the wood. Fredericks and his assistant also carried bush fire aqua backpacks to immediately douse any stray embers, ensuring that the bugs and spiders living within the skeletal trees remained completely unharmed. The series is realized as large-scale digital pigment prints, and extends Fredericks’ longer move from traditional sublime landscape toward contemplative minimalism.
In public presentation, Blaze has circulated through major gallery and museum contexts, including a 2022 solo exhibition at Hamiltons Gallery in London and the Museum of Australian Photography’s survey The Salt Lake (2023–2024), where it appeared alongside earlier bodies of work.
