Home Fires
2017-Present
On October 9, 2017, at 1:30 in the morning, my family and I evacuated our home in Santa Rosa, California, as the Tubbs firestorm came blasting down the hills from Calistoga. Four thousand six hundred homes and over 35,000 acres of cultivated land and wilderness burned for the following eight days.
Two weeks later, we returned. The fire burned down our barn and much of the property and came within 5 feet, but the house miraculously survived. Many were not so very lucky.
Fire is violent, and loss is indiscriminate. No matter where you live, a home is an almost unbearable thing to lose. So began the slow process of reconciling with what was gone. What remained was an examination of the surrounding devastation of homes and land, the lives affected, and the nature of change. There was no looking away.
These are examples of hundreds of photographs taken within a 5-mile radius of my home. These were my neighbors’ and friends’ homes, houses I had previously lived in, forests and fields passed by daily, and my own backyard.
Though there had been much reporting on the areas of Wine Country that had burned, I had not seen another photographer, video, or film crew in my neighborhood. I am not ordinarily a documentarian, but I was profoundly moved to preserve and represent my particular community, a wide-reaching cross-section of socioeconomic status, a landscape that stretched from suburban to deeply rural in a few miles.
I started shooting every morning at dawn and in late afternoons as the sun set. “Golden hour” doing its job of permeating the burn with nostalgia. I walked or drove up roads I did not know existed before the fires. I never had an agenda. It would never get easier to bear witness to such heartbreak.
Throughout the months I was photographing, only a few people stopped to ask what I was doing. I could only answer, “I am an artist & professional photographer. I shoot homes & gardens”.