How the World Ends

While travelling across America in preparation for his cult classic adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, filmmaker John Hillcoat made a series of jarring, uncanny Polaroids of a world seemingly on the brink.

Made during the mid 2000s, Hillcoat's photographs take us through real world disasters that were taking place across North America, from the strip mines of Pennsylvania to New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, from Mount St. Helens to the Oregon coast. Hillcoat was searching for the landscape of McCarthy’s novel, but what he found was a country already bearing the marks of catastrophe.

For this new book Todd Hido was invited into Hillcoat’s archive to edit and sequence the work. Together they shaped the photographs into The Way the World Ends, a fractured, collaged family album from a journey through an America that appears at once familiar and strangely unmoored.

The book takes its form from a first edition of The Road, torn apart and turned inside out to hold something new. Its design transforms the original book into an object that feels found, damaged and repurposed, echoing the landscape Hillcoat encountered and the world McCarthy imagined.

“As time passes, the movie inches closer every day to looking like a documentary.” - John Hillcoat

For all the devastation that runs through McCarthy’s novel, Hillcoat returns to a single word written by the author at the end of his own copy of the book: Hope. The question remains: will we carry the fire?