The Eaton and Palisades Fires have burned more than 40,000 acres and killed at least 27 people in Los Angeles County. Photographers have risked their lives crossing the fire line to capture images of the raging infernos, destroyed homes, and displaced residents. For this week’s newsletter, Alta Journal asked Los Angeles–based photographers to share their work, showing the impact of the fires on their local communities.
JEREMY LINDENFELD
January 7: Driving north on Highway 1 toward the Palisades Fire, I was turned around by a police barricade at Temescal Canyon Road. Instead of heading home, I visited nearby Will Rogers State Beach and watched the towering clouds of smoke drift from behind the canyons out over the Pacific Ocean. I made small talk with a sunbather, Isaac, about the fire. As I was leaving, I snapped a photo of the dwarfed lifeguard station and Isaac against a dark sky.
RACHAEL PORTER
January 18: My friend Ceth Parker, a scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, rents a small house with roommates in Altadena. His place was the only one on the block with damage from the Eaton Fire. The blaze took the entire garage where Ceth kept the 1978 Volkswagen Westfalia he bought from his father. Ceth had plans to restore the van; now he says it’s as much a project as ever.
CHRISTINA GANDOLFO
January 8: On Tuesday evening, just as I was going to bed, I learned of a fire raging in the Altadena hills approximately 11 miles east of my Glendale home. The news was unsettling, but I felt a safe distance away. By the early morning, neighborhoods just a few miles away were under evacuation orders. The speed with which the fire spread was staggering. I watched from my front porch as the day opened to an eerie darkness. The winds raged on.
GREGG SEGAL
These portraits of Altadena residents (taken January 11 and 12) affected by the Eaton Fire feature several of my friends and neighbors.
1. Handyman Bill Threadgill lived with an older friend for 15 years. During the Eaton Fire, Threadgill evacuated the 73-year-old woman to a convalescent center and then returned home, terrified others might be stuck. After making sure that his neighbor was safely evacuated, Threadgill loaded a few keepsakes into his truck as the embers swirled around.
2. Anita Finnegan survived leukemia, a bone marrow transplant, and the death of her husband. Now the Altadena home she leased has burned down. “I lost everything,” Finnegan tells me. “I’m in a state of limbo.”
3. Suzan Young lived with her husband, Rennsen, and two sons, 15-year-old David and 18-year-old Nick (pictured). When they fled the Eaton Fire, Suzan accidentally grabbed a beach bag instead of her carefully packed go bag. When the family returned home the following morning, two houses next door were already incinerated. Rennsen, who suffers from asthma, tried to rush into their house to save a few mementos but was too late. The home was already in flames.
4. Every day since the fire took his house on January 8, David Gutierrez has returned to the plot where the structure once stood just south of Woodbury Road in Altadena. Gutierrez, a landscaper, made a valiant effort to save his home of 23 years with a garden hose, but it was no use. He fled as embers rained down from burning palm trees. “How can I explain what happened to my sons?” he says. “I feel like California is still my place, even in ashes.”
1. On January 7, Totress Beasley submitted the final payment on her home of 13 years. On January 8, her home burned down in the Eaton Fire. Beasley, who shared her home with her 43-year-old son, Aaron Miller (pictured), plans to rebuild. “I’ve been working since I was 16, and my goal was to pay off the house and retire,” she says. “I’m not sure what my retirement will be now.”
2. Actor, musician, and retired broker Alan Wasserman and his wife, Amy Weliky, a retired hand therapist and an artist, live two blocks west of me. The home they’ve lived in for 30 years survived the fire, but they lost their guest house. They’re staying with a friend in Pasadena with their dog, Murray. Wasserman finds some solace playing his saxophone with Murray’s accompaniment.
3. My neighbor Otis “OT” Triplett moved from Pasadena to Altadena in 1974. His barbershop, Otis Fantastic, on Fair Oaks Avenue, was a mainstay of the neighborhood for 35 years. “Back then, Altadena was one of the few places Blacks were able to buy homes,” Triplett says. Though his home survived the fire, 50 members of his Pasadena church, First African Methodist Episcopal, have lost theirs.
4. I met Laura Parker at the California Institute of Arts in the mid-’80s, when she was a grad student in photography. She shared a beautiful house with her husband, Branislov Kecman, looking out over the canyon on Crescent Drive. Parker and Kecman never did any work on the house; the risk of fire was a matter of when, not if. Now nearly all their possessions are ash. Parker lost thousands of photographs, her life’s work. Only a small number of pieces were saved in a storage facility. “I’d like to have a lighter footprint on the earth,” says Parker. “This is an invitation to live a simpler life.”
MATTHEW SMITH
January 19: Nature Friends was a cornerstone of Sierra Madre for over a century. The retreat center (left, photographed in May 2024), meticulously built by Nature Friends members, including Hungarian and German immigrants, and maintained by volunteers, was the site of weddings, baby showers, and meditation workshops. Since the Eaton Fire destroyed the structure, members grieve as if they’ve lost a friend. Zak Clark (pictured), Nature Friends’ caretaker and manager, was living on-site when he evacuated. Plans to rebuild the clubhouse are already underway.•
