photographer puts up billboards to show drought, homelessness, and wildfires in california

drought, housing problems, and wildfires in california

Commercial photographer Thomas Broening has captured images that depict the drought caused by climate change, housing problems, and wildfires eating up California and pays out of his own pocket to put them up as billboards across the state, an exhibition-design reminder to the public about the decline of the Golden State. Broening has been taking photographs since he was 15 years old and has developed the sense of looking for sceneries that are ‘out-of-ordinary.’ While he travels for work, he has always considered California as his home, raising his family and four children in the state. Throughout the past decade, he has observed the gradual descent of the state, a place that he used to regard as magical but has now turned into a catastrophe.

Broening has walked around California, taking shots of its shifting reality, and created the series ‘The End of the Dream’ to form and share his visual anthology with the public. For the photographer the California Dream has always represented the promise of fresh starts, freedom, and limitless prosperity, from the gold rush in the 1840s to the tech boom of the 2010s. He even shares that with hard work and a little bit of luck, anyone could have a real shot at a good life in California. Drawn from the extreme wildfires, drought, and the homeless crisis the state has been experiencing in these past years, the Californian dream faces a threat and has made the state’s future look more like a dystopia than a paradise.

images by Thomas Broening

The decline of california through billboards

Broening quotes what Ben Jackson wrote in 2021 in the London Review of Books: ‘this year is not the new normal, if anything, we will never have it so good’ and proceeds by writing that ‘encampments that are unimaginable in the poorest countries in the world litter every city. Wildfires burn uncontained for months. Once in a generation droughts are commonplace. The End of the Dream is my attempt to chronicle this decline.’ For the last year, he has driven tens of thousands of miles all over California photographing empty river beds and reservoirs, and wildfires that cover millions of acres and encampments both large and small. He has slept in his car near National Guard checkpoints and driven for 16 hours at a time, eating peanut butter sandwiches and In-n-Out Burger.

It is not glamorous work he says, but he persists with his mission in mind. He is creating a visual language that binds all three parts of the project together, each having its own set of photographs. He says that the visual vocabulary he uses employs no pretense and often thinks of a Philip Glass Etude or Brutalist architecture when making the images. He wants to show that wildfires, drought, and encampments are all part of a single whole and that at times, it is not clear what an image shows, but such mystery completes the purpose of his project. ‘Is that a burned-out house or the start of a homeless encampment? Is that landscape decimated by lack of water or because of a runaway fire? All the images are devoid of people and are untethered to a specific time or place. Is this 50 years ago or 50 years in the future? Where are these places? Is this even Earth?’ he writes.

photographer puts up billboards to show drought, homelessness, and wildfires in California

No political agendas in the billboard project

Broening’s ultimate goal with his series is to create an unbiased record of California’s condition these days. He reinstates that his anthology is not meant as a warning or a call to action, but can simply be put as creating an inventory based on images. ‘I am like a grocery clerk counting cereal boxes and soup cans in the middle of the night,’ he compares. He has also opened his website to donations, so he can continue putting up these billboards through the public funds. In May and June this year, he put up six billboards in Oroville and Oakland, and this month (July 2022), he seeks to display six billboards in the southern part of the state.

Broening would like to have his project shown in as many cities in California as possible, for as long as possible, but says he will need financial help to keep it going. He has mentioned that part of his goal is not to solve housing or climate change, as he remains neutral, but to encourage people to acknowledge the problems, which in turn – he hopes – will nudge them to take concrete actions to contribute to their resolutions. Broening has also said that he is neither pushing any political agenda through The End of the Dream project nor putting the blame on anyone or any party.

Thomas Broening visually shows the decline of the golden state