Third Place Jury Award Notice

"Barron Bixler’s photograph of wildfire cleanup in California strikes a nerve. A lone figure wearing a mask and jumpsuit, bent over, seemingly alone in a sea of rubble, a haze muting the air quality between him and the distant hills where houses still stand, does the cruel, difficult work of cleanup in this landscape of environmental and emotional devastation. Situated smack dab in the middle of the frame, the man’s full attention is on the task at hand. Bixler’s photograph recalls images of laborers from earlier decades and centuries. Echoes of Depression-era photographs of people laboring in similarly difficult conditions and much-older paintings depicting similarly hunched-over workers draw a line through time connecting manual labor of today with centuries past. The subject matter is inseparable from the serious subjects of socioeconomics of class and race, yet they neither distract from nor overtake the power of the image itself."

– Juror Alyssa Ortega Coppelman