Striking image of Quebec wildfire fighter amid burnt landscape wins World Press Photo award

Standing on top of a mas‐ sive boulder, a young for‐ est firefighter surveys the damage wrought by Que‐ bec's worst wildfire season in recent history. Nothing but thinned-out, charred trees and a stark sky sur‐ round him.

The black-and-white pho‐ tograph, captured last sum‐ mer by Charles-Frédérick Ouellet and titled A Day in the Life of a Quebec Fire Crew has just won the North and Central American Single Photograph award at the 2023 World Press Photo con‐ test.

Ouellet spent more than a day in the life of a fire crew. In fact, he was part of one as an auxiliary firefighter with the province's wildfire pre‐ vention agency, the Société de protection des forêts con‐ tre le feu (SOPFEU), last year.

The photographer and filmmaker from the borough of Chicoutimi in Quebec's Saguenay-Lac-Saint-Jean re‐ gion received auxiliary fire‐ fighter training for a docu‐ mentary he was working on with fellow photographer, Nicolas Lévesque, in order to be able to document crews' work on the ground.

But when fires began to multiply in the spring, Ouellet and Lévesque decided to pitch in for the most gruelling parts of the season. In the ensuing months, more than 700 fires burned over 4.5 mil‐ lion hectares of Quebec for‐ est.

"I've been working on [the subject of] wildfires for a while now, but this year obvi‐ ously was quite a crazy year where everything was out of control," Ouellet said in an in‐ terview.

Being able to do the work itself became more than a way of gaining access and documenting wildfires and the people fighting them, he said.

"This immersive approach has always been part of my of my way of doing pho‐ tography. I feel it's some‐ times more about under‐ standing the people that you photograph, learning from them, and sometimes seeing from what they tell you about," he said.

The World Press winning photograph depicts firefight‐ er Théo Dagnaud in a forest north of Lac Saint-Jean that had already burned on July 13, 2023. A small crew, in‐ cluding Ouellet, had been dispatched to make sure nothing was burning in the area anymore.

"We were making sure that there was nothing left on the ground really because it was a reburn site and since this rock was there as an ex‐ traction point, it was a great site where we could overview the whole area," Ouellet said.

A reburn site, in wildfire fighting, is an area where fire has already swept through but which could still contain flammable materials that could reignite.

The photo is among 24 winning projects and six hon‐ ourable mentions to be high‐ lighted by the contest this year. The selected pho‐ tographs will also be part of the annual World Press Photo exhibition, shown in 60 locations around the world, including Montreal.

"The jury viewed this single as a potent symbol of the struggle against climate breakdown, serving as a metaphor for humanity's col‐ lective arrogance. The im‐ age's iconic composition reminiscent of a monument poetically embodies the grief and gravity of the environ‐ mental crisis," the World Press's Jury Report said.

Ouellet called the award a "huge honour, especially as a documentary photographer. It's one of the highest re‐ wards that you can get in the world of photojournalism."

Ouellet has also embed‐ ded with fishermen on the St. Lawrence River. In a yearslong project that culminated in several exhibitions as well as a book called Le naufrage (the wreck) in 2018, Ouellet captured not only the work's arduousness and that of the people exercising it - but also the drama of the environ‐ ment: the contrast of the horizon, the jagged rocks, the maritime birds passing through or stopping by.

Fishermen, Ouellet ob‐ served, "have a really visual language where when they speak. And it's actually the same thing when you're working with the wildfire fighters, like they understand so well the ecosystem and the environment."

"There's so much poetry in their way of talking about things," he said.

The photographer is heading back to sea this year as part of a residency through the Canadian Forces

Artists Program. Another project he is working on is a short film about "post-con‐ flict memory" in Bosnia, where he has documented the aftermath of the war that took place in Bosnia and Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995.