It all started with the pufferfish. I was walking along a beach in Guerrero, Mexico. I was six months pregnant. The beach had that glittering, limitless quality that seems to settle the nervous system, each wave like an immersive wash. And suddenly, there it was right in front of me: a dead pufferfish on the sand. I looked at it for a while, this forlorn little creature, and snapped a picture.

A dead pufferfish, washed up on the Guerrero shore. Photo: Lauren Markham

It became clear very quickly that this was not the only dead fish on the beach. I saw another pufferfish, and then another. More still bobbed in the surf. I scanned the beach: there were dozens of marine corpses—more pufferfish, and other species, too—and then more still, splayed on the sand. I’d later learn a red tide was to blame, something that was becoming all the more common as a result of climate change. It was a terrible scene, like a massacre. I kept taking pictures. This, too, felt obscene. What were all of these morbid pictures for?

The instinct had something to do, I knew, with grief. Living in the age of climate catastrophe, as I explore in my new book Immemorial, it feels as though the world we live in is slipping away before our eyes. That is because in many concrete ways, it is. The photograph is a gesture of record: we must see the vanishing as it’s happening so we don’t forget what’s being lost.

But I also understood the instinct to photograph to be a mediating force: something to put between myself and the dead fish. Photographing insulated me from my sorrow about the ravaged world, allowing me to focus on the picture I was taking instead.

Had taking pictures always been this way for me? I don’t think so. When I was younger, I identified primarily as a photographer. I couldn’t paint or draw, but I liked the opportunity to capture the world as it was by taking its picture. My middle school had a darkroom, and I got a manual camera—a Pentax K-1000—for my 12th birthday. I can still feel the film advancing as I move the lever beneath my thumb, and can still hear the click of the shutter. I spent hours upon hours taking pictures, developing pictures, printing pictures. I started to look at the world differently, as if through a camera lens. In high school and then college, I’d spend hours in the darkroom, leaving friends and parties to be alone in the seething red light of creation. It was a tremendous feeling, watching the image as it appeared on the page, a resuscitated ghost.

Back in high school, I studied the romantics and fell in love with Ralph Waldo Emerson. He wrote, “A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world.” It seemed to me that the camera afforded me some glimpse into the hidden interior of things, and it also forced me to look more closely at features of the world I might otherwise just pass by.

Here's an image I took in high school of my best friend, T, and some trees that seemed somehow her kindred. T was someone who saw into the true, pulsing heart of things; she seemed native to that which I could still barely touch. She was an artist, a real one. Next to her, I always felt somewhat shriveled, stunted, but also hungry for her remnant glow. I was playing around with infrared film at the time, which picked up light not visible to the human eye—light that tended to emanate off of living things, like human skin, flower petals, and leaves. But with T, I used regular film; she was already illuminated from within. I asked her to spin for me.

I loved how this image came out: T on one half of the page, the other half just trees and blank sky, that great unknown.

T against the trees.Photo: Lauren Markham

In photography class, we were given an assignment to manipulate an image we took using the negatives themselves (no Photoshop). I turned on the enlarger as I usually did to make a print of an image from the spinning series. But this time, when the timer went off, I took out the negative and flipped it. I set my experiment in the developer bath. Here were two Ts in inverted twirls, the branches of late spring intertwined right smack in the middle of the image. It was perfect.

Two Ts in inverted twirls.Photo: Lauren Markham

This was probably the most interesting photograph I ever made. In truth, unlike T, I really wasn’t a very good photographer. I was just a diligent one, and obsessed with the way the camera demanded my total presence.

Eventually, I graduated college and lost access to a free dark room. I spent more time writing, until one day I wasn’t a photographer anymore. Years passed and then there I was in Mexico, nearly forty, mostly out of touch with T and about to have a baby, looking through my stupid iPhone screen at a pufferfish massacre with the same cavernous searching I’d felt as a kid.

It kept happening, this secret disaster documentation. Soon after, on a writing assignment, I traveled up to the mountain meadows of the Sierra Nevada where a forest fire had recently burned. The devastation was so potent that it was almost too hard to bear. Once again, when no one else was around, I picked up the camera, telling myself it was for my notes. There was one group of now-dead trees that made a ring in the sky above. I positioned myself beneath them and turned the camera on myself such that the trees formed a forbidding crown around my head. I closed my eyes and snapped. I took a few of these images, never quite satisfied with the outcome or my reason for photographing in the first place. The pictures certainly weren’t for the story I was writing. They weren’t for social media. They seemed crude, somehow, even cruel. I showed them to no one. A selfie in the burn? Might as well just tattoo “asshole” on my forehead and call it a day.

The author below burned trees in Sierra Nevada.

Photo: Lauren Markham

But if I’m feeling a bit more generous toward myself, I can understand it as an attempt to fix the memory in place—not just of the devastation, but of myself implicated within it. From the image, you can’t even tell the trees are burned, really; they just look winter-bared, like the ones in those old photos of T spinning. But to this day, the tree halo image conjures in me the dread I felt that day driving past spear after spear of burned up tree—a whole forest, gone—far more than the video I took of the drive.

Our age of perpetual emergency demands a record of what is disappearing, but it also demands spaces for grief. We build memorials for wars and genocides and bombings and other deaths. Where are the memorials to climate change? I stood beneath that circle of blackened trees because it felt like I’d found a temple.

I’d long been fascinated by memorials. When I was eleven years old, around the time I got my beloved Pentax, my father got a bee in his bonnet and decided that his California kids weren’t being taught enough U.S. history. To rectify this, we traveled to Washington, D.C. on our way to visit family for Thanksgiving. D.C. was gray and miserable, but my dad was delighted. We visited the Jefferson memorial then trudged past the White House and toward the Mall, where we saw the World War II memorial, the Washington Monument, and the Lincoln Memorial. From there, we kept walking and emerged from a patch of leafless trees to the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial.

Vietnam Veterans Memorial, Washington, D.C.

Courtesy of the National Parks Service

Two diagonal walls of gleaming black rock ascended to a meeting point—like a V, or an open book—and were etched with the seemingly endless names of the dead. As I approached the wall, near-breathless, I noticed that the stone reflected my own image like a mirror. Without fully understanding what I was beholding, I began to cry.

I looked around at the other visitors standing solemnly before the rock, searching among the names. Some of them were weeping, too. Others were placing small offerings—notes, flowers, a small bottle of Jim Beam—at the foot of the memorial, as if we were in a chapel, or at a gravestone, or standing at the foot of some hulking god.

As a grumpy tween, I had been determined to feel disinterested in everything we’d done that day. I knew little about the war with Vietnam and practically nothing of nationalism or the hegemony of memory or the problems of the historical record. (And I certainly knew nothing of the great controversy that surrounded the etched rock I was beholding, or the bullying of its young architect, Maya Lin.) But I could have stood there all day in the cold, feeling, watching.

Ever since the fish massacre a few years back, I have been feeling the need to find similar spaces in which to grieve the impacts of climate change—to remember the past and look toward the future. I started looking for them everywhere I went.

I didn’t have to look far. It turns out Maya Lin had long since taken up climate change as a focus. In 2021, she erected Ghost Forest in Madison Square Park—a stand of 40 Atlantic Cedars killed by salination that she’d dragged up to New York then positioned in the park as if they were still living. They stood there for a year, continuing to “gray out,” as she put it, while the living trees surrounding the ghost forest continued to bloom and grow. It was an uncanny installation; it was possible to walk beneath them, particularly in daylight, with only a slight feeling that something was amiss.

Here’s an image I took in New York of the Ghost Forest. My friend Jude—who hopped the fence with me a few hours after the park had closed in order to stroll beneath the trees at night, then bolted with me when we were yelled at by the guards—stands just outside the frame.

The Ghost Forest, Madison Square Park, 2021.

Photo: Lauren Markham

The Ghost Forest was transfixing. It also heartened me to learn that I wasn’t alone in my pursuit to find—or in Lin’s case, create—memorials to climate change. I began to write about all of this (climate grief, the art of memorials, my sad little pufferfish, dead trees) in what would become Immemorial.

But there was a problem. As I write about at length in Immemorial, words were starting to fail me. As a writer—one who had long ago left my camera behind in favor of the page—words were my medium, but I was finding myself struggling to put them to good use. Linguistic wear was beginning to set in: how many times can you use the word “ravage” to describe a burned-out hillside before it ceases to mean anything? Or “biblical”? Most of what I wrote about was related to either migration or climate change, and I found myself reaching for the same tired words, feeling as though I was scribbling while the world was burning. Had I erred in putting down my camera long ago? I longed to be like Lin: making something from the immediate stuff of the ravaged world itself.

So I continued to look to visual art—particularly installations and performance art—as an antidote to the impotence of words, and I began to chronicle this search for Immemorial. The book became a kind of memorial of my own, through seeking the memorializing of others.

“Ice Watch” was another work that moved me. In 2014, the artists Olafur Eliasson and Minik Rosing moved hunks of ice from a calved glacier to Copenhagen, where a climate action conference was being held. The blocks of ice were positioned around a great outdoor courtyard, where visitors could walk among them. Like with Lin’s Ghost Forest, what Eliasson and Rosing made struck me as a de-abstraction. Here were bits of the glacier—a faraway entity for most of us living on Earth—right in front of you. And with each passing moment, more of it was gone. You had to face its disappearance head on.

Olafur Eliasson and Minik Rosing, Ice Watch, 2014. Supported by Bloomberg. Installation view: Tate Modern, London, 2018. Photo:J ustin Sutcliffe.

Courtesy of the artist; Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York/Los Angeles; neugerriemschneider, Berlin © 2014 Olafur Eliasson

I loved the images I found of people placing their ears against the ice, as if to listen, or wrapping the ice in an embrace. This wasn’t an explicit memorial, but it accomplished what most memorials set out to do: bring visitors into direct encounter with an atrocity and its attendant grief so that they might fully feel it.

A friend had also recently introduced me to the work of Jason DeCaires Taylor, who installs underwater sculpture gardens in bleached-out parts of the sea, where coral reefs have disappeared. In time, sea creatures make homes of his sculptures, rendering them otherworldly, purposeful, literally and figuratively abundant with life. (One of his favorite things, the artist told me, was that he could never predict how and what his creations would become. The sea, with all its creatures and unknown permutations, was a kind of collaborator.)

Silent Evolution, Jason deCaires Taylor, MUSA, Mexico.

Courtesy of the artist

I was moved by the restorative nature of this work. But I was also taken with the narratives of the sculptures themselves. In Cyprus, for instance, DeCaires Taylor built an underwater forest that looks like something from a storybook. Human figures walk along the ocean floor, including a number of little kids with cameras. The scene speaks to the looming devastations of climate change. “The forest children, camera in hand as they play hide-and-seek in the woods, point their lenses at the human race,” the artist writes. They are hoping for a future, he explains, in which the wildness of the oceans is restored.

Jason deCaires Taylor, Museum of Underwater Sculpture Ayia Napa, Cyprus, 2021.

Courtesy of the artist

I recognized myself in those children’s fervent desire to record and capture. I was a journalist, after all, and the world was slipping away. Someone had to record the vanishings! But the slippage also demanded an unmediated regard. I wanted to travel to Cyprus and swim down to the bottom of the ocean to see this forest for myself. No cameras, no notebook, no assignment. What would it mean to stand in my grief without the instinct to capture what I was grieving?

Back when I was hungry for the world, and not yet grieving it, cameras offered me a slowing down of time. The lens was a portal, not a retreat. The most moving memorial is a portal, too: it offers a direct encounter with something we might otherwise wish to avoid. A memorial asks us to feel the weight of something and return to our lives altered by it.

Here’s another image I took when I was 17, sitting in a park with T. We’d traveled to Italy, just the two of us, ravenous to be in the bigness of the world. That day at the park, someone had lifted great white sheets among the trees so that they billowed in the wind. They took such peculiar and ever-changing shapes. We both pulled out our cameras and began taking photographs.

A day in the park with T.

Photo: Lauren Markham

I don’t remember where we were that day, in what park or even what city. And, like the cubist guitars of Picasso and Braques (how the comparison would have delighted me back them), I can’t know for sure if this is an image I took, or one of T’s. But I remember what it felt like to lie on the ground, gaze turned upward, watching those sheets dance. The photo is a portal back to that time and place.

One thing I came to understand in writing Immemorial is that memorials are always about time: a place where one goes to stand in the present to look simultaneously backward and forward. “In the next 200 years,” the Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnasson wrote on a memorial plaque to a melted glacier, “all our glaciers are expected to follow the same path. This monument is to acknowledge that we know what is happening and what needs to be done. Only you know if we did it.”

I see the dancing sheet photo, which hangs in my office now, as its own form of memorial: not to an atrocity, but to a disappeared time. Maybe a memory can’t help but speak to some form of catastrophe and grief. That photograph, it’s true, is also a testament to lost friendship and a forsaken dedication to presence. Back then I wanted to see and feel it all. We had no sense of what devastation lay ahead of us—fires, deaths, heartbreaks, abandonments, floods—and how climate change, and life itself, would soon transfigure the world we were only just beginning to know. Oh, how I’d later mourn. But at the moment of the photo it was just the two of us, so young and in love with encounter, with the unknown future, with one another, watching those sheets catch the wind. ♦