In the summer of 2011, in the Jemez Mountains of New Mexico, a falling power line sparked a wildfire that burned 158,753 acres of forest. From their home in Santa Fe, thirty air miles southeast, photographers Patricia Galagan and Philip Metcalf watched what came to be known as the Las Conchas fire burn day and night for more than a month. As soon as the roads reopened, they went to the mountains to see the damage this violent fire had wrought. Taking a trail to the rim of Cochiti Canyon, they passed through sections of forest that had burned so hot that nothing remained but blackened trunks and negative spaces where huge tree roots had been. The canyon and the waves of ridges beyond were black with standing dead trees. The visual chaos of the burned forest, at first daunting, pushed them to look harder, to see differently. As they did so, the forest began to look beautiful in its highly altered state. For more than seven years they were compelled to make photographs of the aftermath of the fire to draw people beyond the news-cycle images of smoke and flames into the reality of a forest after an extreme fire. Forest Ghosts is both their ode to the old forest and their gift to help us understand that, in this era of accelerating climate change and increasingly devastating wildfires all over the American West, the new forests will never be the same, but we can still find beauty and enlightenment in the aftermath. AUTHORS: Patricia Galagan is a fine-art photographer based in Santa Fe whose work often concerns the aftermath of upheaval in the landscape. Her work was part of the 2015 Fire Season show at the New Mexico Museum of Art, which has also been shown at Fototeca de Cuba in Havana and at Fotografika Gallaery near Geneva, Switzerland. She was awarded a solo show at Blue Sky Gallery in Portland, Oregon, by Photollucida in 2014. With her husband, Philip Metcalf, she was an artist-in-residence at Bandelier National Monument in 2015. Philip Metcalf is a landscape photographer who creates black-and-white infrared images. His passion is to interpret nature, both pristine and altered by man, especially in the American Southwest. Increasingly, environmental concerns influence his work. In 2015, he was an artist-in-residence at Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico with his wife, Patricia Galagan. His work has been shown at the New Mexico Museum of Art and the San Diego Art Institute and is included in the photo archives of the New Mexico History Museum. 40 duotone and 40 colour photographs