A photographer and hotshot turns his lens to the flames.
PHOTOS BY KYLE MILLER
WORDS BY BELLA BUTLER
Home is something we know in our bodies, a series of senses logged in our system. For Kyle Miller, it’s the smell of smoke, the crackling of burning trees and revving of chainsaws, the hearty pat of a hand on your back at the end of a long day. His home—at least in part—is among a crew who have also dedicated their lives to managing wildfire.
Miller is a captain of the Wyoming Interagency Hot Shots, an elite wildland fire crew based out of the Bighorn National Forest. What began the summer before college as a seasonal gig in northwest Montana, where he grew up, blossomed into a deep passion, and from there, a career. Now 39, Miller lives with his wife and two young children in Cody, Wyoming, but spends much of the year fighting wildfire—and photographing it.
Though headlines tend to favor wildfire news, especially during its season in the American West, an opaque wall still separates the public from some of its most intense domestic frontlines, impeding visibility, but also understanding, Miller says. Through sharing images from places where many journalists can’t even go, he’s breaking down that wall—or at least punching a hole through it.
He first brought a camera on assignment in Alaska in 2004. It was a cheap disposable, and the photos he captured of the crew’s daily jetboat commute up the Tanana River were blurry and low-quality. He bought a nicer camera, still hoping to capture the unique places his work was taking him and the action he was seeing. Two decades later, his photos have been published widely, and are currently displayed at Cody’s Buffalo Bill Center for the West in an exhibit called “Fire on the Mountain.”
There are two layers to Miller’s photos: the visual and the story. At first, his photos are striking. Heavily focused on the role light plays in the images, Miller captures how light is made soft by smoke, and how it is made brilliant by flames against a night sky. His work masterfully renders the shape and weight of a landscape and its features, and despite the surrounding drama, his images nearly always draw the eye to the subject, often a wildland firefighter.
“When I see people shooting wildfire, a lot of people are looking for big flames, and I’m really never looking for that,” Miller says. “I’m usually looking for something that makes the photo simple.” He looks for a clear subject, usually a subject doing something.
This is where the second layer begins. The strikingness of the photos is what draws you in, but the story is what asks you to linger. Evidence of his intimate understanding, Miller is a master at capturing a web of relationships—between the firefighter and the land, the land and the fire, the firefighter and the fire, and sometimes the firefighters with each other.
He says wildfire poses a bit of a contradiction in terms of home. For much of the year, it’s the thing that takes him away from one of his homes, the one he shares with his family. But in another way, it’s the element that defines home for him. One of his photos included in this gallery explains it well. Gathered at camp after an intense day working on a fire in southern Wyoming in 2016, campfire illuminates the smiling, dirt-stained faces of his crew, and moonlight strikes their hunched backs. There’s a closeness you feel in the photo—a bond Miller tries to describe with words but says he falls short of. Put simply, it’s a photo of home.
Kyle Miller is a captain for the Wyoming Hotshots and a wildfire photographer. He lives in Cody, Wyoming with his family.
Bella Butler is a freelance writer from southwest Montana and the author of the Feeling Through Fire series published by Mountain Journal. She is the managing editor of Mountain Outlaw.
