Wildfire: Surreal Photos of Los Angeles in Ashes

On Tuesday, dry conditions and powerful winds combined to set Los Angeles ablaze, a series of wildfires spreading across LA County that emergency workers have thus far been unable to put down. Local fire chief Kristin Crowley called the worst fire, burning through the Pacific Palisades area, “one of the most destructive natural disasters in the history of Los Angeles.” As it stands, at least ten people have been killed and dozens more injured. Thousands of homes and businesses have been reduced to ash as losses exceed an estimated $10 billion.

Over the last few days, longtime VICE photographer and writer Jamie Lee Taete has been out documenting the fires and their aftermath in the areas near his home in Pasadena. His images capture a familiar neighborhood rendered suddenly alien by the sheer force of the inferno, a landscape of charred remains largely absent of people as just under 180,000 flee under evacuation orders, with another 200,000 on standby. Looting has begun and a 6PM-6AM curfew has been imposed in parts of the city, as experts and local and national government wrestle with the role climate change has played in the disaster, and the question of how to stop this happening again in a place where terrifying towers of flame are evermore common.

VICE called Jamie to ask what it feels like when your home burns down.

VICE: Hey man, how are you?
Jamie Lee Taete: I’m alright. How are you doing?

I’m OK; I’m not on the cusp of a gigantic wildfire like you, so…
I’m driving it back into it now.

That sounds sensible. How close has the fire come to your house?
I think the edge of the fire is about two miles from my house, which is uncomfortably close. You can smell the smoke in our house; it’s like ash-smelling, from the sky. I live in Pasadena, and the fires made it to Altadena, which is the next neighborhood over and has burned down.

How scared are you at the moment, on a scale of 1 to 10?
I don’t know. I’m just feeling kind of numb, more than anything. After spending two days wandering through the ruins of people’s lives, it’s sort of emotionally depleted me. I’m feeling stressed, sure, but I dunno if I can put a number on it. I’ve lost track of time because I haven’t slept very much.

What’s your experience of it been so far?
So the first day, it was in the Pacific Palisades, which is on the beach, kind of in the Canyons. I parked in the next neighborhood over and walked across. It didn’t seem too bad as I was walking in but it just sort of exploded while I was in there. I saw multiple businesses burn down. Roads have been clogged by people fleeing and abandoning their cars, which have then been bulldozed out of the way by local emergency services, so there were wrecked cars everywhere. Both sides of the road were on fire. And then walking back out, I didn’t know that it was physically possible for wind to be this strong, but the wind got so strong that I couldn’t walk any more and I had to hide in a stranger’s car for 90 minutes while a fire burnt around me on all sides, with embers flying horizontally at the car. A full ‘Hell-on-Earth’ kind of vibe. In two minutes it changed from being a little brush fire on a hillside to like, the apocalypse. 

What was it like, staring into your own potential demise?
Not great. I mean, I wasn’t worried about my impending demise, because that’s a beach community, so I was like, ‘Okay, worst-case scenario, I can just jump in the ocean and it’ll be fucking miserable, but I’m not gonna die.’ But yeah, I mean, just terrifying, like heartbreaking, watching house after house burn on the hillside. Car after car, landmarks… I’ve been to the area so many times, but at one point it became hard to tell where I was because everything I knew was not there any more or on fire: the toilets, the little snack kiosk, everything.

In the videos you sent over, one guy was livestreaming someone’s house burning down.
He was a local news blogger. There’s the local news, the national news, but then there’s also a lot of YouTubers who seem to have turned up. Yesterday, I encountered a huge group of YouTube photo bros; the kind of man who is approximately 28 years old and out for adventure… I saw a lot of those. As long as people are being safe and not hurting anyone else, I think it’s really important to cover this shit. Although I did have to tell some people to move because they were standing next to some burning power lines, and didn’t seem to be aware that they might fall on them.

Fire is one of the most ancient, elemental forces there is, and LA is a hypermodern city. Were there any moments when you were walking around in the fire, or in its aftermath, where it felt like those two realities were sort of meeting each other, head on?
I guess hearing everyone’s phones go off with the geolocated evacuation warnings… and yeah, the livestreaming, but that’s not exactly new, you know? 

It’s newer than fire.
Yeah, it’s definitely newer than fire.

LA is the home of cinema, showbiz… What’s it like when that bursts into flames?
The neighborhood I live in, which is one of the ones that’s burning, a lot of stuff gets filmed there because it looks very classically ‘suburban America.’ As stupid as this sounds, yesterday when I was walking around, I kept thinking, like, ‘Oh shit, I think this is where they filmed Scream 2, and now that’s gone—that’s weird.’ And then obviously tons of celebrity homes have burned down.

Which ones?
In my neighborhood, there’s Mandy Moore. I thought she’d lost her home but it turns out she’s OK, as are Meryl Streep and Grimes; I think they’re a little further south. Shia LaBeouf is definitely fine. The Pacific Palisades is a very wealthy neighborhood, though; I saw Billy Crystal, John Goodman, and Leighton Meester all lost houses there.

Is the Oh Happy Day Vegan Cafe somewhere that you used to patronize?
No. That was another one where I was like, ‘Oh, there’s a vegan restaurant here. I should have tried that, it was five minutes from my house.’

What’s going with the huge topiary rabbit?
Oh, that’s the Bunny Museum. That’s been… I mean, it’s obviously all heartbreaking, but I think the Bunny Museum has been kind of the saddest thing I’ve seen. It was the personal collection of this couple who’d been collecting rabbit memorabilia for 40 years, I think. So it was thousands and thousands of rabbit-related things in this one building. And it was just ash, just completely gone, and is obviously completely irreplaceable; their life’s work, I guess.

I kind of love the Bunny Museum; it was a really unique way of looking at cultural history. They had everything: food packaging, toys, ornaments, dating back hundreds of years. I feel like it gave a more complete encapsulation of history than like, the Natural History Museum or something. But yeah, it’s ash now.

And then the Barry Manilow vinyl.
I was just walking in the neighborhood next to where I live, walking through the ashes trying to spot anything recognizable. It is kind of really surprising how few things remain recognizable when a house burns. Many of the houses I looked at, there was just not one single item. I don’t know, it’s just so hard to imagine, like, an entire kitchen full of pots and pans and cutlery just going up in flames.

The children’s slide did quite well to survive, I think.
Yeah.

Were there any live rabbits at the Bunny Museum?
There were, but they got them out.

Okay, that’s good at least. There’s a silver lining.
I saw an interview on the news; I think he said they got the live ones out.

All right, thanks a lot and stay safe.
Bye bye.

Follow Jamie Lee Taete on Instagram @jamieleecurtistaete