Life on the Edge

Jerome, Idaho, seems like an neat, ordinary city—until you approach the parts of town where many of its 10,000 inhabitants live on the edge, in all senses of the word. Unregulated and unzoned houses teeter on the precipice of the Snake River Canyon, which drops sheerly down below to a sleek, twisting river 1700 km long, formed by volcanic activity of the Yellowstone hotspot. Native Americans lived on its banks for thousands of years before European inhabitants began to cause the landscape to change—creating the stark contrast of this photograph: the idyllically civilised set against the apocalyptically wild.