Julian Charrière’s photography series, An Invitation to Disappear, captures the nuanced life of light in the wake of destruction. Brilliant fiery hues burst through smoke, diffusing and swirling around silhouetted trees of a palm oil plantation in Southeast Asia. Though artificially induced, these images allude to the natural phenomenon resultant of the 1815 eruption of the nearby Tambora volcano in which particles known as aerosols filled the entire earth’s atmosphere, causing the twilight hours to be marked by startling afterglows of pink, purple, red, and orange. Struck by the epic sublimity of these moments, European painters like JMW Turner and Caspar David Friedrich created a visual legacy of the ensuing volcanic winter. As epitomized by palm oil production—a process which requires the felling of ecologically diverse regions in favor of profitable monocultures—it is now the deeds of mankind which alter the world environment more severely than nature itself. Charrière’s tight shots of the palm trees situated within their claustrophobic grid invoke a certain unnamed anxiety of the world being caught in the midst of an unsustainable desire to cater to the global economy in which palm oil can be found in almost 50% of all supermarket goods, unbeknownst to the majority of consumers. Rather than fall into ignorant complacency, Charrière uses this series to turn tragedy into a much more approachable, dark sort of beauty.