In June 2023, the photographer Devin Oktar Yalkin moved to Pasadena, to a house about three miles from Eaton Canyon, the site of one of two deadly fires in Los Angeles that began spreading out of control January 7. Yalkin, who grew up in New York City, would often drive through the leafy streets of Altadena after dropping his young son off at school, veering toward Mount Wilson, which rises above Eaton Canyon. “I would head toward the mountain,” said Yalkin, 43. Friends and acquaintances who were artists and musicians had been able to buy their first homes in the neighborhood, and Yalkin hoped to one day join them. “I kept telling my wife, ‘This is the place I would love to own a home,’” he said.
The morning after the fire started in Eaton Canyon, Yalkin drove into the neighborhood to try to find a friend, but he quickly became disoriented amid the chaos as residents fled. He took a few photographs — including one in the portfolio below of a house on fire — but when he could not find his friend, he returned to his wife and 6-year-old son in order to evacuate them. Two days later, on Saturday, January 10, he and his family returned, and we traveled together as he began photographing the burned city the fires left behind.
Los Angeles Wildfires
The Lost City
To produce work about an ongoing disaster is ethically fraught: You are encountering people in distress and documenting some of the most difficult moments of their lives. Yalkin is not a photographer who reflexively veers toward the jagged edge of action, and he is not a volume shooter. He moves slowly through a landscape, trying, as he told me, “to spend time with a moment” and looking for images that will stay in a viewer’s mind. “It’s never about ‘getting the shot,’” he said. “It’s, How can I mirror my experience? How has this reflected onto me emotionally, and how can I put that back into the world?” The photos included in this portfolio are ones that linger on the essential questions these fires have raised: What have humans done to our habitat, and what could have been done to prevent such tragedy? Is anywhere safe? “Work that asks questions,” Yalkin says, “instead of leaving you with answers.”
At night, before entering the house he rented and rejoining his family — for a couple of evenings his 79-year-old mother was also in the home — he took off his ash-covered clothes and left his boots outside the door. (Because of warnings about water quality, in the first days of our reporting we washed our clothes but did not take showers.) His work from the fires focused on his neighbors’ dreams — what had become of them and where they might end up. He told me he still thinks of Altadena and what it might be like to one day live there. “I’m still enchanted by it,” he said. “It’s something I think I’ll never stop dreaming about.”
More on the Los Angeles Wildfires
- ‘My Community Is Gone. It’s Just a Curse That My House Is There.’
- How Is Hollywood Impacted by the L.A. Wildfires?
- Will the L.A. Fires Sink Bass, Newsom – and the Olympics?
