©Billie Mandle, Asunder published by tbw books

I first became aware of Billie Mandle’s practice of seeing deeply through her project Reconciliation, a ten-year series photographing shafts of light falling into confessional spaces–quiet, intimate places that, as she writes, “hold the memory of past presences.” Mandle’s photographs ask us to slow down and consider what remains when people are no longer there: traces of belief, ritual, and memory embedded within architecture and light.

Her recently released a new monograph Asunder, published by TBW Books, speaks to similar themes, but this time in the natural world. In the aftermath of the 2020 Glass Fire in Napa County, California, a landscape of devastation became the site of a deeply personal encounter with loss, resilience, and transformation. Over the course of three years, the artist returned to the burned forests surrounding her aunt’s home, hiking among charred trees and a landscape forever altered by fire. What began as a response to destruction gradually became an exploration of the space between death and survival.

These photographs inhabit that uncertainty. The blackened trunks and scarred branches speak to immense loss, yet beneath their burned exteriors, many of the trees remain alive. The forest becomes a place of contradictions: dead and living, fragile and resilient. At a moment when climate change is making wildfires increasingly intense and altering ecosystems in ways that may be irreversible, the work asks us to look closely at what survives and what may never return.

A conversation with the artist follows.

©Billie Mandle, Spread from Asunder published by tbw books

©Billie Mandle, Spread from Asunder published by tbw books

©Billie Mandle, Spread from Asunder published by tbw books

Billie Mandle is photographer living in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Her practice is grounded in attention to specific places, exploring what images can and cannot reveal. Mandle has received fellowships from Light Work, Yaddo, the Massachusetts Cultural Council, and the New York Foundation for the Arts, as well as a research grant from UCLA. Her books include Asunder (TBW, 2025), Circumference (Dust Collective, 2024), Reconciliation (Kehrer Verlag, 2020), and Stellar Skytron (Dust Collective, 2020). She has been nominated for the Foam Paul Huf Award and the Prix Pictet, and her photographs are held in public collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the Addison Gallery; and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She is a professor of photography at Massachusetts College of Art and Design having previously taught at Hampshire College. She holds an MFA from MassArt and a BA in biology from Williams College. She grew up in California.

Instagram: @sbilliemandle

©BIllie Mandle, Unknown (Jelly Palm) from the book, Asunder

Asunder

These pictures were made over the course of three years, in forests burned by the 2020 Glass Fire in Napa County, California. My aunt lives down the road from where the fire began and though her house survived, the surrounding land burned. After she returned home, we drove up from Los Angeles to be with her.

I started hiking through ghostly forests, humbled at being surrounded by so much devastation. I made pictures slowly at first, and then with urgency. The camera was my way to contend with the unraveling – a way to acknowledge loss and the sense of being lost.

Though fire is necessary for healthy forests, our warming planet produces fires that burn hotter and spread further. And scientists predict that many forests now will never return in the same way. Delicate ecosystems often can’t adapt to the new climate: new plant species will replace old ones, birds and animals won’t return.

During my hikes, I realized that most of the trees, though burned and scarred, were not dead. Beneath their charred exterior, the trees were eerily alive – somehow simultaneously dead and alive, inhabiting two states at the same time.

©BIllie Mandle, Unknown (Oaks) from the book, Asunder

Tell us about your growing up and what brought you to photography…

From a young age, I took pictures with my father’s 35 mm Nikkormat. I was very shy and taking pictures let me observe the world rather than having to interact with it. I always thought I would be a scientist, and I studied biology in college. Then in my late 20s, I found my way back to photography and went to graduate school for it.

©BIllie Mandle, Unknown (Blue Aak) from the book, Asunder

Congratulations on Asunder, how did the book come about?

Thank you! Shortly after I finished photographing, I started thinking that the images might work as a book. I made the work by bushwacking through burned forests – long, meandering hikes. That sense of wandering felt like it belonged in book form. I also had two distinct bodies of images that I wanted to bring together as two chapters, and after some experimentation, a book felt like the right structure to hold both.

©BIllie Mandle, Manzanita 1 from the book, Asunder

You have a practice of seeing deeply, exploring subjects that are not obvious at first glance. Do you see threads between Reconciliation and Asunder in terms of discovering the unseen?

Initially, I didn’t see threads between the two projects. (For Reconciliation I photographed Catholic confessionals.) I was unsure about making landscapes, since I previously photographed mostly interiors. But as I looked at the work, it slowly dawned on me that I was photographing in the same way and searching for similar things. I was drawn to the forest because it was an enclosed, entangled place – like the small darkness of a confessional. With Reconciliation I searched for the remnants of voices and past presences left behind. In photographing the burned forests, I was also trying to reveal traces of what was lost — the sense of what the forest had been. I wanted to evoke the hidden forces that were still present, that were an innate part of the forest, no matter what was lost. There was something sacred about these immense, charred forests, that I wanted to convey.

I read Etel Adnan’s book Shifting the Silence while I was photographing, and this passage stuck with me: “our words don’t suit prophecies anymore. That power is left to other species: to oak trees, for example…[…] There are still cathedrals with silent corners in them, dispersed over the world.”
I tend to photograph “silent corners” no matter where they are –

©BIllie Mandle, Unknown (Canyon Live Oak) from the book, Asunder

You describe making photographs “slowly at first, and then with urgency.” What changed for you during those first encounters, and how did that urgency manifest itself in the work?

I was uncertain about documenting the aftermath of a disaster, so I hesitated at first. The work was also difficult to make — trekking through burned forests was physically and emotionally challenging. And it was during the pandemic, so leaving my 4-year-old while I was working felt complicated. But I love these forests. Making the photographs simply felt necessary. That was the urgency.

©BIllie Mandle, Unknown (Scrub Oak) from the book, Asunder

How did discovering that many of the seemingly dead trees were actually alive change your understanding of the landscape and the photographs you were making? What did the passage of time reveal that you could not have seen during your first visit? Did the landscape and your relationship to it change in ways you had anticipated?

The more I learned about the ecology of forest succession, the more poignant it was to be there. It allowed me to see more:  lichen would suddenly appear or all of a sudden I noticed tiny green shoots on the sides of redwood trees. I spent three years photographing. As I returned, I looked for changes —  for what was growing, what had fallen, what had been cleared away. I was more attentive to the different layers of time and the different stages of life around me. A “burned forest” is not a static entity – it is such a limited phrase, though it’s the clumsy shorthand I use when talking about the work. Even burned, the forest was a patchwork of different processes of becoming and decaying. I began to see how the death of a tree has different stages of decay, that it is not one moment, much as life has different stages of growth.

©BIllie Mandle, Unknown (Canyon Live Oak 2) from the book, Asunder

You describe the camera as “a way to acknowledge loss and the sense of being lost.” Can you talk more about that? What does photography allow you to confront or understand that words might not?

Photography allows me to engage directly with the world. I work slowly, my camera on a tripod, and typically my exposures are long. I think of making a picture as a process of absorption — as if light, time, and air flow into my camera during each exposure. I want to engage with perception as something immersive rather than passive. This kind of attention is a way to be with loss and show what was lost.

Our visual experience is both expansive and limited – we can see so much more than we can understand or have language for. I want to use images to convey this contradiction.

©BIllie Mandle, Unknown 3 from the book, Asunder

Will you continue to document these forests?

I am photographing forests that are nearby, but not these directly. Too much poison oak now.

©BIllie Mandle, Unknown 1 from the book, Asunder

Who or what is currently inspiring you?

So much! It is summer: swimming in lakes, my family, plums. I’ve also been reading Claire Carlise’s books which are wonderful. And the Constantine Manos exhibit at the Boston Athenaeum is inspiring.

©BIllie Mandle, Unknown (Redwood Bark) from the book, Asunder

©BIllie Mandle, Unknown 6 from the book, Asunder

©BIllie Mandle, Unknown (Canyon Live Oak 3) from the book, Asunder

TBW Books is an award-winning, independent photography publishing house founded in Oakland in 2006 by Paul Schiek.

In 2023, TBW Books launched Workshop de Allende, an artist retreat in Mexico.

In 2024, TBW began a partnership with the Miner Anderson Family Foundation, who shares our vision of publishing the work of underrepresented artists.

TBW Books acknowledges that it occupies the unceded land of the Lisjan Ohlone people, also known as Oakland.

Instagram: @tbwbooks

To order book: https://tbwbooks.com/products/asunder