Making care visible: A photo essay on wildfire risk management in California

Care is rarely centred in conversations about disasters or how their risks are known, managed and lived with by communities. Dominant narratives tend to prioritise logics of control, top-down management and efficiency – frameworks more readily aligned with technical, institutional, or securitised approaches of risk. Within these discourses, care is often overlooked or marginalised, reduced to the (emotional) labour of women or emergency responders, typically framed as reactive support for needy others during disaster response or recovery. This paper seeks to reclaim care – not as rescue, heroism, or saviourism – but as an ongoing relational practice concerned with maintaining, continuing and repairing “as well as possible relations” (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 6). Care theorists have long understood care as a vital affective orientation, an ethico-political commitment and a material doing (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017; Tronto, 1993). From this perspective, care is “a vital necessity” (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 67) – something all are entangled with and dependent upon. In disaster contexts, then, care is not peripheral but foundational to how communities endure and sustain life amid escalating risk. This paper, therefore, brings care to the centre, asking: How does care surface in the ways disaster risk is known, managed and lived with? And how might we make such care visible? (see Plates 1–13)Scholars of visual communication have long highlighted photography's capacity to evoke affect, capture nuance and convey counter-narratives. They argue that photographs can illuminate the socio-spatial dimensions, processes and relationships that shape the worlds we study (see Chaplin, 2011; O'Neill, 2025; Pauwels, 2012; Rose, 2008). Building on this, visual scholars have demonstrated how photo essays can serve as powerful tools for communicating research beyond academic audiences, disrupting expert-driven, text-heavy conventions of research dissemination (Pink, 2020). Yet photo essays remain underrepresented in both academic and public discourses – especially those that move beyond journalistic formats or dominant media aesthetics (O'Neill, 2025; Pink, 2020). While disaster researchers have increasingly used photographs, these are often employed to document dramatic impacts and aftermaths: “collapsed infrastructure and destitute, hurt, or grieving people” (Kelman, 2024, p. 37). Such representations are frequently “sensationalized and sanitized” (Kelman, 2024, p. 37) and rarely capture the everyday practices of risk management or the relational work that communities rely on to navigate life in disaster-prone regions.In what follows, I present a photo essay that draws on techniques of landscape and documentary photography, while steering clear of mainstream journalistic aesthetics, sensationalism and sanitisation. This essay shifts the visual focus from the spectacular and moments of rupture to the everyday, ongoing care that emerges in how disaster risk is understood, managed and lived with. I argue that the photo essay is particularly well-suited to making such care visible, as it can draw attention to often overlooked and ambivalent relations and practices of care – such as routine maintenance, repair work and more-than-human contributions. It also enables the presentation of aspects of care that resist easy articulation in words, including its embodied, affective and non-verbal dimensions.This photo essay draws on six months of (visual) ethnographic research in the world of wildfire risk management in Sonoma County, California – a region that has experienced eight federally declared disasters, including four catastrophic wildfires over the past decade. It features mundane images of ordinary wildfire risk management activities – I make no claim that they are spectacular or complete, but I do hope they linger, unsettle and quietly invite viewers to look closely, feel deeply and reflect with care. Collectively, these images help render visible the entanglement of care as communities in Sonoma County navigate life in what seems like an increasingly risky world – opening space for viewers' reflection, dialogue and debate. While photo essays are often valued for their ability to depict aspects of social and cultural life that are difficult to represent in text alone” (Wagner, 2007, p. 47), visual communication scholars have increasingly emphasised that the meaning of a photograph rarely resides in a single image (O'Neill, 2025; Pink, 2020). Rather, meaning emerges through the interplay of images, text and other materials. This photo essay is therefore structured as a series of image-based vignettes that weave together theoretical insights, field encounters, photographs, fieldnotes and interview excerpts [1].By attending to the ordinary, everyday practices of wildfire risk management – clearing brush, managing stockpiles, coordinating neighbours – this paper renders visible the dispersed, relational and sometimes ambiguous ways in which “as well as possible relations” (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 6) surface in how communities know, manage and live with wildfire risk in Sonoma County. In the case made visible, care did not unfold through heroism, speech, or traditional gendered roles, but rather through mundane practices of risk management, more-than-human entanglements and collective efforts to live (better) with fire. The relations of care perhaps appeared disengaged, bureaucratic, or unintentional – and may even be dismissed as not-care by viewers. Yet I argue that such diverse and ambivalent engagements reveal the often-unrecognised pervasiveness of care within wildfire risk management – whereby, amongst others, land stewards, sheep, computers at the emergency operations centre, fire personnel, fire itself, all are entangled and dependent upon the care. In many ways, wildfire risk management is a caring entanglement: a collective, more-than-human endeavour sustained through interdependent acts of maintenance and repair that enables communities – human and more-than-human – to continue inhabiting fire-prone landscapes in ways that feel liveable, familiar and worthwhile.The photo essay format – composed of 13 image-based vignettes – made these relations of care visible in ways conventional academic text-based formats often do not. The interplay of images and text attempted to offer a textured, sensorial entry into the world of wildfire risk management, creating space for complexity, ambiguity and speculation. Unlike many disaster photo essays – particularly those that adopt mainstream media aesthetics that gravitate toward spectacle and destruction (Kelman, 2024) – this work centred the everyday, the banal and the more-than-human: chipped wood, grazing sheep, hand-painted signs and half-filled Go-Bags. Foregrounding these ordinary scenes matters, shifting attention from crisis to continuity and highlighting the sustained, quiet care that occurs before, during and after wildfires. It also expands the frame of both risk management and care beyond human action to include the “unnatural alliances” (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 80) that constitute such caring worlds.Visual communication scholars argue that photo essays, as a sustained form of critical engagement, hold the potential to engage broader audiences in our research and disrupt dominant narratives (Pink, 2020). At a moment marked by urgent concerns about the possibilities for life amid the escalating wildfire and climate crisis, I contend that photo essays are more necessary than ever. They encourage us to notice, make visible and linger – carefully – with the complex realities of how life is (and is not) sustained in the world. Disaster scholars stand to benefit from embracing this fertile ground of critical image-based work, as these approaches foreground the embodied, relational and affective dimensions of disaster settings, while fostering ethical attentiveness and nuanced representational choices that honour both communities and landscapes (supporting commitments to “A Disaster Studies Manifesto” RADIX, n.d.).Ultimately, I invite viewers to recognise care as “a vital necessity” (Puig de la Bellacasa, 2017, p. 67) – something that sustains and holds together while simultaneously opening new possibilities for inhabiting and flourishing in an increasingly disastrous world.This research was conducted in Sonoma County, on the unceded ancestral lands of the Southern Pomo and Coast Miwok peoples, who are today united as the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria. I acknowledge the ongoing presence, knowledge and culture of Native and Indigenous peoples – not only in the past, but in the present and future. I would also like to thank my research participants and PhD supervisors, Ben Anderson and Léonie Newhouse, for their time, encouragement and kindness.