An American Community in 10 Fragments

At daybreak on New Year’s Eve, the photographer Benjamin Rasmussen arrived at the still-smoldering Marshall Fire, in the suburban communities of Superior and Louisville, Colorado. The burned area, which encompassed more than 1,000 homes, remained barricaded, so Rasmussen stayed at a distance, letting worried residents use his camera’s zoom lens to try to make out whether their houses were still standing.

Rasmussen has photographed sites of tragedy before, and notes the challenge of capturing these events with texture and specificity, especially as climate-related disasters have become commonplace. “You realize that, visually, it’s really hard to differentiate one event from the next,” he told me.

Later in the day, as he followed locals back into their neighborhoods, he noticed scraps of paper that had blown from houses and landed, singed, several feet or even blocks from their points of origin.

From the October 2021 issue: How civilians saved their Oregon town from two megafires

“For the most part,” Rasmussen said, the area had “sort of cookie-cutter homes, very suburban.” But the burned pages he found—featuring lines from the Torah, an announcement about the 1975–76 Junior Miss Majorette, a Japanese text about the fountain of youth—offered intimate, if fractured, peeks at a community that was “more complex and broad and diverse than I would have assumed.”

While a picture of a person crying next to a house on fire is evocative, he told me, it can create distance between the viewer and the subject—the image is both too familiar and, in a way, too general. By photographing these idiosyncratic ruins instead of a more traditional scene, Rasmussen prompts us to look more closely.

His series makes a collection of the scattered fragments, an accidental archive of disintegration marking the advent of a new year.

This article appears in the April 2022 print edition with the headline “Paper Trail.”