calding water is pounding on my skin, blunting my nausea. It will take just a few days until I can get to Altadena to photograph what remains there, but on this day I’m flat in my bathtub, hovering above myself, trying to remember if I drank water while covering the Palisades that afternoon. I dreamily call one of my best friends to take me to the ER, where I throw up a few more times, pass out, and wake up hooked up to an IV. I’m told I have heat exhaustion.

I’m connected to both the Eaton and Palisades fires in that I live in Los Angeles, but I’m lucky not to have been seriously affected. I feel like a prop balanced between two realities: one of my own experience of managing my life during the week of Jan. 8, and one of me as a journalist, trying to visualize the meaning of suffering and citywide loss. The chatter of images, sensory information, and conversations rattle my judgment and brain, leaving my body stinging and my head over a toilet bowl.

I comb through the monotonous coverage, clocking the repetitive vocabulary and sentence structure used to cover wildfires. It’s twisted that there’s now a formula for covering them — that’s how common an occurrence fire destruction has become in California. I’ve become accustomed to reading the same phrases, recognizing the same emotions, scrolling through the same imagery. I end each day in an existential crisis on the phone with my situationship, my voice strained as I explain that I’m not enough, that it’s overwhelmingly impossible to capture the mess.

A charred van on East Poppyfields Drive on Altadena’s west side, March 20, 2025.

A tree adorned with messages of love and hope near a charred home on East Poppyfields Drive, March 20, 2025.

I’m added to multiple group chats and I end up giving updates on the fires’ movements to my Venice surf girlies, family, and aunties because there’s so much misinformation. On Altadena’s west side, I find myself standing in the middle of flattened homes owned by Black families for generations, feeling like I’m at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains even though they are about two miles away. Across town, I’m walking through a burned-down mobile park along the Pacific Coast Highway, watching a guy with a 360-degree camera, trendy clothes, no safety gear, and a single-wheel electric skateboard livestream the wreckage. I see hot film photographers with $3,000 cameras document a burned-out Los Angeles County storage unit. (All the journalists I see are wearing Nomex protective gear and P100 masks, and have visible identification.) It feels like we’re doing the same thing, but I have a journalist’s responsibilities.

Damage from the Eaton fire along East Poppyfields Drive in Altadena.

Witnessing grief is visceral. It cracks and seethes and blisters. It cools out and rages back for more. Grief looks like downturned eyes and blank stares. It sounds like pregnant pauses during small talk and check-ins. It smells like frying up my first meal of the day at 3 p.m. It feels like sucking air through a P100 mask while hiking up a blackened hill off the Pacific Coast Highway to get more photos of burned homes and crying residents.

Grief becomes common ground between strangers, a smoldering pile of memories. A dude tells me, “Sure, you can photograph me, but I really don’t know what’s going on right now,” as he looks at the remains of his home.

I hate that I have a platform to present my perspective as a Black photojournalist covering the fires while the people I talk to, most of whom are also Black, are buried under insurance claims and the emotional weight of rebuilding their lives.

Remains of homes incinerated by the Eaton fire off Lake Avenue at the base of the Angeles National Forest on Altadena’s west side, March 20, 2025.

I think constantly about Kasen Chandler, a 24-year-old single mother and third-generation resident of Altadena whose grandmother’s house burned down in the Eaton fire. Kasen, who is recently divorced and was bouncing between her grandmother’s home and her mom’s apartment before the fire, now lives with her whole family — both sets of grandparents, mom, and son — under one roof.

Kasen Chandler picks up shoes during a weekly Altadena Recovery Team drive for Eaton fire evacuees, Jan. 25, 2025.

She was reconstructing her life after her divorce when the fires hit, and now that work has been compounded by being homeless. “Maybe in the article it can be mentioned how work is routine now in order to rebuild,” she texted me as we tried to coordinate a portrait. “Can’t even be comfortable without a home and it’s unsettling sleeping and knowing our home can never be rebuilt, it has to die, and we have to go through the process of grief while working our asses off.”

I think about Makai Ward, whose family home was spared but who experienced the terror of evacuating while the flames advanced onto her street. She graciously allowed me to accompany her while she returned home to collect her grandmother’s engagement ring, something she forgot when she hurriedly grabbed random objects before leaving.

Makai Ward reenters her bedroom on Jan. 20, 2025, after evacuating from the Eaton fire the night of Jan. 8. She says she doesn’t even remember what she grabbed and returned to her intact but smoky home to find her grandmother’s engagement ring.

As we entered the still smoky, ash-filled kitchen, she pointed out that her Chinese takeout dinner was still on the counter, now hardened and dehydrated in its container with a fork sticking out. To help process the event and put her energy into something productive, she had started the Altadena Recovery Team with friends from high school to distribute aid to her neighbors while she figured out permanent housing for herself and her mom.

I’m connected to Altadena in two ways: First, my parents rented a place there until I was 2, before we moved to Orange County. Second, Dana, one of my mom’s best friends, lives there. I found myself on Dana’s couch, listening to her share Altadena memories with her dad. They talked about how the neighborhood was a rare instance of the American dream: Multiple cultures and a middle class convened to create an idyllic suburb where everyone knew one another. I hear them worry about the change and uncertainty to come.

Los Angeles is supposed to be a politically active city, but I see no outcry. Everyone’s shrugging. Words from an article about competitive authoritarianism float in my brain, charring hope for my future, financial or otherwise. My time in Los Angeles, like that of many others, is defined by my fight to stay here. I think the emotional mush I feel is the beginning of the end of me living here.

A brick chimney, one of many in houses erected throughout Altadena, marks where a home once stood on Altadena’s west side.

I like to believe that I’m an educated and cautious person who understands that the American dream isn’t real. Yet I’m slowly realizing that the promise is two-faced: the dream paired with the risk of it disappearing overnight. My dream can disappear faster than it took to create it. These days, disappearance seems to be more common, with entire generational safety nets going up in literal flames in minutes.

A destroyed home on Altadena’s west side.

Black Angelenos deserve to be in control of our own well-being. We are the culture shapers and the reason millions of transplants flock here. It’s getting hard for us to remain here with the slowing economy, the lack of homeownership opportunities, and the increasing allure of the inland empire, with its promises of a more affordable lifestyle.

I live here for the moments of magic amid the chaos, the way the sunset sparkles in the traffic while KCRW blares, the camaraderie with other Angelenos. I’m realizing those moments are temporary — soon the city will push me out, and my version of Los Angeles will end when I leave.

No other place feels like home to me. For now, I’ll deal with the anxiety that my time may be coming.

Witnessing the Grief and Loss of the Los Angeles Fires

It’s morning again in America. Federal agents snatch students off the streets. The White House boasts of banishing hundreds of people to a Salvadoran prison. Head Start and domestic violence shelters await the chopping block. The Trump administration is repurposing antiracism into a grenade and lobbing it at the remnants of the welfare state. But regular people are providing the varied, creative, noncooperative opposition to the neo-fascist administrative takeover that we need.

Hammer&Hope

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Gabriella Angotti-Jones

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Witnessing the Grief and Loss of the Los Angeles Fires

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