The Leap Through Fire: Story of Ed Kashi’s Iconic Image
(This is the story behind the photograph, a glimpse into the moment, the process, and the vision that brought it to life.)
What does it take to capture one unforgettable frame?
In 1991, Ed Kashi stood in the middle of Derry, Northern Ireland, during a night heavy with history and tension. He was there with his Leica cameras, photographing the Protestant community during the Troubles. That night, children played around a huge bonfire built to mark a 300-year-old battle. A boy leapt into the flames, and Kashi pressed the shutter at exactly the right second. The result was an image that would later define his career.
Why does this moment still matter today?
The picture is not only a record of Northern Ireland’s conflict, but also a symbol of photography itself, stopping time, freezing movement, and capturing energy you cannot plan. Kashi calls it a decisive but wild moment, one that came out of instinct rather than control. For him, this single frame shows both the weight of history and the unpredictable beauty of chance. It remains one of his most powerful images, a leap through fire that became unforgettable
A Period in Time – Derry, Northern Ireland, 1991
(Ed Kashi, from the series No Surrender: The Protestants)
The streets of Derry in Northern Ireland were still heavy with tension in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The Troubles had already lasted twenty years, with British soldiers on patrol and communities split along Catholic and Protestant lines. In working-class Protestant neighborhoods, history was never just in the past. Every July, bonfires were built to mark the victory of the Protestant King William of Orange in 1689, an event still remembered more than three centuries later.
Ed Kashi was there with his camera. This was his first long documentary project, one that took him deep into the Protestant community from 1988 to 1992. He spent days with families and young people, often on the streets where paramilitary groups were also present. On the night of July 11, as midnight approached, he found himself among a group of kids waiting for the fire to be lit.
“This is from my long-term, really my first true documentary personal project, looking at the Protestant community in Northern Ireland, and I worked on this between 1988 and 1992,” Kashi recalls. “It was at a time where the conflict between the Catholics and the Protestants was still ongoing. The British military was still on the streets. This was in a Protestant enclave in the city of Derry, and I was spending a lot of time with the kids and young people.”
As the fire burned, the children began to play, leaping across the flames. Smoke rose into the night sky, carrying with it both fear and celebration. For Kashi, the scene was unpredictable, but also rich with photographic possibility.
“They’ve lit the bonfire and they’re playing and jumping,” he says. “I happen to capture this moment. My gosh, I hoped I got the decisive moment. I couldn’t have planned that the shape and form of his body would be rendered as it was.”
At the time, he worked with two Leica cameras, one loaded with black-and-white film, the other with color. Magazines had not fully moved to color yet, so photographers often carried both. Kashi stood near the fire for nearly an hour, waiting for the right frame. The kids kept jumping, giving him more than one chance. But one image stood above the rest: the silhouette of a boy frozen mid-air against the sky, leaping above the flames, with the spire of the church rising in the background.
“There’s nothing better than repetitive action as a photographer,” he explains. “I had more than one opportunity, but that image, that was the one.”
Years later, when editing his retrospective book A Period in Time, Kashi chose this frame for the cover. It wasn’t only a record of Northern Ireland’s history, but also a symbol of photography itself, the act of stopping movement, fixing it forever in space and time.
“There was something about having this human figure suspended in space,” Kashi reflects. “For me, it just resonated with this idea of a period in time. I’m fixing, in my very tiny, humble way, a period in history, in time and space.”
The picture remains a reminder of how documentary photography can capture both the weight of history and the wild unpredictability of a single second.
