Just after midnight on January 8, as fire raged across the San Gabriel Mountains above Altadena, Claire Schwartz hoped that she would be safe. “We’re about as far from the mountains as you can get,” she says. “I was still like, There’s no way it’s going to reach here.”
Even so, she set to work: “doomsday prepping.” At 1 a.m., she put aside the things that mattered—important documents, a well-sealed box of keepsakes, family photos. “Like, what if the very worst happens?” she says.
Two and a half hours later, the scene outdoors had become chaotic. The smoke was so thick that she couldn’t make out her hands. Fighting 100-mile-per-hour winds, Schwartz and her partner loaded the car, gathering their pets, changes of clothes, and those preorganized essentials. “The smoke was from a block over. Houses were already burning down,” she says.
Through the next tense days, waiting to hear about her home’s status, Schwartz scanned news headlines and scrolled social media. A theme emerged on Facebook: “People finding random photos and book pages and all sorts of things in the yard that didn’t belong to them. Somebody should really be gathering these. A lost and found for the community, right?” However, says Schwartz, “because I was very busy and traumatized myself, I [kept] hoping somebody else would do it.” A couple weeks passed; the accumulation of images posted online grew. “It was like, OK...nobody is…so I guess it’s on me.”
By late January, she’d built a website, Eaton Fire Found Photos, and invited locals to alert her to their finds. “I collect antique photos, track down the identity of the subjects, then return the photos to any living relatives I can find,” she posted in the site’s About section. “Seeing neighbors post online about photos blown away...I realized that—for the first and possibly only time—my hobby might be able to help someone in a time of need.”
Schwartz found herself juggling time spent retrieving and returning survivors’ photos with the hours needed to meet with insurance adjusters and smoke remediation professionals (her home stands). She soon compiled about 100 items—yearbook pages, portraits, jigsaw-puzzle-shaped book leaves, even coloring book pages, many singed brown around the edges. “I’m just collecting them, cleaning them, keeping them safe,” she says.
As word of her efforts has spread, the visibility has provided Schwartz with many sets of volunteer eyes. While book pages are, she reports, “the number-one thing I’m finding,” she’s encouraging folks to be mindful during their daily walks. To look amid the tree branches or just-trimmed hedges or piles of trash hugging fences. To carry a plastic bag with them to protect their fragile finds. To remember that each item holds a story. “It’s a bit frustrating,” she explains, “if somebody just says, ‘I saw something at this address.’” She worries that she might arrive too late—that “the winds [could] blow it away, or a car has driven over it and ripped it in half.”
Reuniting families with their keepsake images has taught her about Altadena’s categories of loss. “For the folks who are really excited just to have anything back, that’s been a wonderful feeling, to just hand off this tiny bit of normalcy,” she says. “For the people who are, ‘Oh my God, this is all that’s left?’ That’s really hard. They tell me about everything else they lost. That’s a part of this that I wasn’t expecting. I don’t think I accounted for how hard it would be to, basically, be the bearer of even more bad news. Like, I wish I could replace it all.”
Yet Schwartz’s hunting-gathering effort—as of this reporting, she has collected 292 items—has helped stitch together the community. “It has just made me so much more aware of what’s happening in my own backyard, which is lovely, but I hate that it took this,” she says. That word of the site spread so quickly telegraphs a crucial need—and hope—for those suffering profound loss. “This isn’t just about me. To get this done, I really need the community behind me. I want people to know: If anybody is going back to their property—or workers or utility folks—would love it if everybody would just keep an eye out. Grab [things you find]. I will come get them.”
Schwartz will keep going for as long as images keep turning up. These rescued pieces become prompts, recovered history. “I’m super-paranoid about losing stuff. I don’t know why. I’ve never been through an experience where I have lost a family heirloom,” she says. “[But] my family survived the Holocaust—so there’s a whole half of my family that I don’t really have photos of. So to me, photos are precious. They need to be safe for future generations. Maybe that’s part of the why. Maybe this strikes a chord. Maybe everybody shares the same paranoia. I think they do now.”•
Lynell George is an award-winning Los Angeles–based journalist and essayist. She has been a staff writer for both L.A. Weekly and the Los Angeles Times. Her work has appeared in various news outlets including the New York Times; Smithsonian; Vibe; Boom: A Journal of California Preservation; Sierra; Essence; and Ms. She was selected to be a University of Southern California Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism fellow in 2013 and received the Huntington Library’s Alan Jutzi Fellowship for her studies of California writer Octavia E. Butler in 2017. She is the recipient of a 2017 Grammy Award for her liner notes for Otis Redding Live at the Whisky A Go Go. George is the author of three books of nonfiction: No Crystal Stair: African Americans in the City of Angels (Verso/Doubleday); After/Image: Los Angeles Outside the Frame (Angel City Press); and her most recent book, A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia E. Butler (Angel City Press), published in 2020, which was a Hugo Award finalist in the Best Related Work category in 2021.
