Robert Landsburg went to Mount St. Helens to photograph a changing volcano. In the spring of 1980, the Portland photographer made repeated trips to the mountain as activity increased. On 18 May, he was close enough to record the eruption as it began.
When the lateral blast came towards him, Landsburg kept working for a few frames. He rewound the film, removed the camera from its tripod, packed it away and used his body to shield it. He did not survive. Recovery teams found the camera and intact film beneath him 17 days later. Those frames were developed and later appeared in National Geographic.
The equipment matters here because there was no instant transmission from the mountain; the images travelled on film. Landsburg was shooting a Nikon F2 Photomic loaded with Kodachrome 64. The pictures had to survive as physical film, then be recovered, processed and printed. The camera and roll were the whole chain of custody.
That story has been told many times, often as a brief account of courage and sacrifice. Filmmaker Marq Evans says he wanted to know more about Landsburg himself. His short documentary, 8:32 AM: The Last Photographs of Robert Landsburg, brings in family members who have not previously spoken on camera about the loss, alongside Landsburg’s journals, surviving camera and photographic archive.
That change of scale is welcome. The final frames are extraordinary, but a photographer’s life is more than the last roll of film. Journals and contact with family can give those images their proper setting: the person who made them, the choices that led him there, and the work he had been doing before the eruption.
The film is also being developed into a longer project, with 8mm recreation footage planned at the mountain. For those of us who still enjoy loading a camera, making a frame and waiting to see what the negative holds, the story carries a particular weight. Film is material. It can be scratched, fogged, lost or, as in this case, preserved against impossible odds.
Landsburg’s photographs became evidence of a disaster and part of its visual history. The documentary’s more personal material may help us see the photographer behind that evidence. That is a story worth keeping bookmarked.
Sources
- The McCaw: 8:32 AM: The Last Photographs of Robert Landsburg
- U.S. Geological Survey: Mount St. Helens in eruption, 18 May 1980
- National Geographic, January 1981, “I Was There” (print article)
- PetaPixel’s report on the documentary