GENERAL STATEMENT ABOUT EATON FIRE PROJECTS
A longtime resident of Altadena, Lara Jo Regan’s extensive work on the 2025 Eaton wildfire illuminates previously unexplored aspects of post-fire worlds that unfold the year following a massive urban conflagration long after the flames have been extinguished and the media storm has diminished. To cope with the shock and magnitude of the tragedy, Regan spent every day for months methodically documenting the fire’s apocalyptic aftermath and human toll, walking every street and public zone in Altadena many times over to capture the constantly shifting dramatic and surreal states of the landscape, the atmospheric desolation and the human grief.
Able to move back into her surviving home after two months of smoke damage remediation, her embedded access and love of the community made her feel intensely obligated to capture and humanize the tragedy in deeper more expansive ways that explored less obvious currents of meaning while memorializing all that would soon be be flattened and gone. This long-term coverage made possible the discovery of unexpected themes and motifs that gradually emerged from the destruction and the strange post-fire culture that alighted in its wake. Eight different series of photos ultimately formed, four under the banner of THE DEATH OF A HOME.
Regan hopes the work will contribute to the collective recognition and memory of what is manifested, experienced and lost in such devastating wildfires while providing yet another sobering reminder of the risk and staggering cost of a rapidly warming planet.
BACKROUND / NIGHT OF FIRE
In the two decades before the Eaton fire, Regan extensively photographed Altadena and the surrounding area, resulting in the largest collection of street photography of the San Gabriel Valley entitled “East of West.” She discovered the idyllic enclave of Altadena in the Nineties while location scouting for an L.A. Times magazine cover story on Octavia Butler, the legendary science fiction writer then a member of Altadena’s historic black community. Regan was taken by the unique eclectic beauty and character of the tight-knit foothill community, a hidden gem marked by its old growth trees, profusion of hiking trails and rich architectural history. She was especially drawn to its open-minded spirit that attracted many creative types and a diverse populace of all incomes and ethnic groups living in the kind of rare integrated harmony that defied cynics.
Over two decades later when the monstrous 2025 Eaton blaze erupted, Regan was one of the first on the scene but found herself in the unusual position of trying to document the fire as a journalist while simultaneously protecting her home from the rapidly encroaching firestorm. She had covered the 1993 Kinneola wildfire in Altadena whose damage to residential areas was considerable, but limited to streets within a few blocks of the foothills where it broke out, never imagining an urban wildfire could advance much further. That assumption was promptly routed when she witnessed the Eaton conflagration ravenously consume her daughter’s school a good distance from the canyon where it originated as it fast became a veritable fire hurricane whose reach was no longer tracked in blocks but miles. When the flames and ember showers actually spread below Altadena Drive into the business district, she was forced to entertain the unthinkable possibility that even the homes as far south near the Pasadena border could be torched, including her own.
She rushed home where her family took shifts repeatedly watering down their property in the dark (the power had gone out) while loading their car with valuables by flashlight. Wind gusts up to 90mph slammed coal size embers and black smoke into their house all night that they fought off with garden hoses from their roof. Around 4am, they finally evacuated when they could feel the heat of the flames. Miraculously, the fierce wind died down minutes later with the light of dawn, arresting the wall of approaching flames and miraculously sparring all the homes on their street. The fire maps published the following day were sobering, their surviving enclave proportionally resembling a tiny bite out of a big, charred sandwich.
The destruction was mind-boggling: the 1993 Kinneola fire - still considered a major disaster - destroyed 196 structures. The 2025 Eaton fire destroyed 9,418. The homes and art studios of nearly everyone they knew in the community had perished.