Reid Blackburn: The Photographer Who Did Not Come Back

Reid Blackburn was twenty-seven years old and working as a photographer for the Vancouver Columbian newspaper and National Geographic when Mount St. Helens began threatening to erupt in the spring of nineteen eighty. He was assigned to document the volcano. He set up his equipment at Coldwater I, an observation point roughly eight miles from the summit, where the USGS had also placed instruments.

On May eighteenth, nineteen eighty, at eight thirty-two in the morning, the lateral blast reached Coldwater I three minutes after it destroyed Coldwater II and killed David Johnston. Blackburn was in his car.

His camera was found afterward in the volcanic debris. The last frames he had taken were still on the film, images of the mountain in the moments before or during the eruption's onset. The film survived. The photographs exist. Blackburn did not.

His body was recovered, buried in the ash that had covered the observation point and everything around it. He was one of fifty-seven people who died on May eighteenth. He was there to photograph what would happen, and in the end the record is what remained: images taken by a twenty-seven-year-old who knew the mountain was dangerous and stayed at his post because his job was to show people what it looked like.

The photographs he took that morning have been studied and published. They are among the few visual records of the eruption's early moments from close range. The film that survived his death is more than evidence. It is the last work he did, exactly what he had been sent there to do.