© Robin Friend 2021 Courtesy Loose Joints.

The flames lick like a temptress. a primal instinct engaged. A birthright. In Greek mythology, Prometheus brought fire to humans in defiance of the gods. The Hindu Rig Veda tells of Mātariśvan returning the fire that was stolen from humans. Fire is a gift from beyond, and with it comes divine power. Though one can wonder, was it fire’s divinity or our delusions of grandeur that got us to where we are now?

Thousands of years later, fire is still a way we might hope to summon a pinch of cosmic power. Great Britain’s Bonfire Night, Guy Fawkes Night, Fireworks Night, or whatever you might call it, catalyzes bonfires and fireworks all across the UK every November 5th. Over seven years, photographer Robin Friend photographed these festivities, which feature in his new book, Apiary (Loose Joints). Apiary—a term for a collection of beehives—is Friend’s second book with Loose Joints and showcases bewitching photographs in Lewes, a town in England where some of the most extravagant displays of this fire worship take place. “I’ve got a funny relationship with Lewes,” Friend says. “I’ve lived there, I guess, three times throughout my 38 years.” After moving back to Lewes at 14, Friend explains, “I’d only been here a few months when [I had] my first experience with those bonfire nights. Explosions everywhere, bright lights, crowds of people.”

The commemorative night in question loosely honors The Gunpowder Plot of 1605, whereby a group of English Catholics hoped to assassinate King James I by blowing up Parliament, restoring the Catholic Monarchy—power through fire. For the initiated, this plot might recall a particular grinning, mustache-lined visage. Over the past couple decades, Guy Fawkes, one of the participants in this plot, has been popularized—and his motives bastardized—by the comic and 2005 film V for Vendetta, and the infamous cyber-anarchist hacker movement, Anonymous.

“I think the way you said ‘bastardizes’ is interesting,” remarks Friend. “History just gets warped and adapted and tweaked and forgotten and changed over time.” Despite these watered-down aesthetics permeating through popular culture, the spirit of November 5, 1605 lives on in burning tribute of both fire and community.

Lurking groups of young boys, hives of wooden pallets, earthly angels reaching towards the sky, burning crosses parading through the street; Apiary explores the history of this night, unraveling in a contemporary world. Fire gives power, permission, purification. “It’s almost a cleansing sort of thing,” explains Friend of the night. “And then obviously these huge, fucking massive bonfires, it’s got this sort of primitive, sort of primordial [element] that feels...” Friend pauses, recalibrates, “...we’ve all looked at the fire before... and you just get lost in it.”

And lost we may be. At the close of Apiary, Friend offers a quote from Thomas Hobbes: “The attaining to this soveraigne power, is by two ways...” And paraphrased, Hobbes suggests that the first is by fear, and the second, by mutual respect. So where do we stand? “It really is now just an excuse to be heard,” offers Friend. The Bonfire Nights depicted in Apiary are Lewes residents’ way of looking for an answer, demanding to be seen, through fire. A pursuit of the divine.

It was Hindu scripture that Oppenheimer was said to have recited after successfully witnessing the detonation of an atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert in 1945: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.” It is, perhaps, the most well-known line from the Bhagavad-Gita, but also the most misunderstood. Is the invocation so different from those igniting these monumental fires? To be seen, heard, to disrupt an omnipotent continuity, to finally take a seat in the court of gods?