In the 1970s, Lawrence Blair and his brother Lorne set out on an expedition through the Indonesian archipelago in search of the greater bird-of-paradise. During their adventures they lived among various tribes, including Asmat cannibals in West Papua and the ‘dream wanderers’ of Borneo, and  faced down fearsome dragons in Komodo.  Over the course of ten years, they took some 12,000 colour photographs on 35 mm transparency. When Lawrence’s Los Angeles home burnt down in 1984, albums of these slides were destroyed by fire, causing them to melt and gel together in a great lump of plastic.

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Remarkably, it was later found that the sheets of transparencies in the centre of the albums had partially survived. Some were perfect, others near-perfect, while yet others had been transformed by heat and the fire retardant in the firefighters’ hoses into wonderful and surreal images.

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Shadows of the Ring of Fire showcases a selection of these surviving photographs, which have remained unseen for almost 40 years. The transformation of many of the images conjures a gateway between the real world, the spiritual realm and that of fleeting dreams. They give the reader a window onto a time that is now lost to sight and memory.