WILDFIRES / HUMAN IMPACT / CLIMATE CHANGE
BURN INDEX
Harri Pälviranta
With climate change, wildfires are becoming more frequent and fierce. They are spreading faster and lasting longer. The wildfires in Southern Europe in 2023 exemplify this development: approximately fourteen percent of the island of Rhodes burned in just one week, while wildfires in southern Italy continued for months. Near Los Angeles, wildfires scorched thousands of homes within just a few days in 2025, while South Korea experienced the worst wildfire in its documented history.
Between 2023 and 2025, Pälviranta traveled to Greece, Spain, Australia, Portugal, the United States (Los Angeles), and South Korea to document the material effects and multifaceted traces left by large-scale wildfires. Rather than depicting the fires themselves, Pälviranta focuses on their aftermath, portraying the remnants they leave behind.
The work reflects on the impact of wildfires on global climate conditions and on the role humans play in their increasing frequency and scale.
Clothbound, foiled hardcover with a tipped-in photograph
80 pages
52 photographs
Offset printing
Coloured edges
21 × 27,5 cm
First edition of 400 copies
ISBN 978-91-990235-5-7
Designed by Janne Riikonen
September 2026
To be released at Polycopies in Paris. The pre-orders are shipped the following week.
Pre-order discount: 35€
Tanya Sharapova’s debut book Kolsky is a photographic project about the Kola Peninsula in northwestern Russia. Bordering Finland and Norway, Kola is a strategically important and heavily militarised region, home to Russia’s Northern Fleet and major nuclear, military and industrial infrastructure. Fishing, oil, gas and mineral extraction are central to its economy, while its Soviet history has left a lasting mark on the region’s communities and environment.
Sharapova returned to the peninsula repeatedly from 2019 to 2024, witnessing a period of significant political and social change. Rather than presenting Kola simply as either a remote Arctic landscape or a symbol of contemporary Russia, Kolsky approaches it as a complex region shaped by overlapping historical and political forces. Following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, propaganda, self-censorship and social pressure became increasingly visible in everyday life. Through close relationships with the people she photographs, Sharapova allows her subjects to participate in shaping their own representations, creating images that move between the absurd, the unsettling and the intimate.