Red Skies

On January 7, 2025 fires broke out across Los Angeles county and quickly became an inferno unlike any the city has ever seen. Tens of thousands have evacuated; lives have been lost; hundreds of thousands of homes and businesses lost power; entire neighborhoods sit in smoldering ruins, community buildings reduced to ash.

Californians like myself think we have become accustomed to wildfires. Almost everyone here already has a story, a near miss, a family member whose house burned or memories of some time the air was so dense you couldn’t open your windows for a week. The sky turns orange. You hope the car is full of gas and try to remember where you stashed your fire “go bag” filled with flashlights, water and food. But even as they appear with increasing frequency, these flames are never routine. Amidst fear, there is an overwhelming sense of loss.

California-based photographer Max Whittaker has been at the scene of many such fires over the years. His images are stark, visceral snapshots of disaster, chronicling the cost to wildlife, residents and homes, as well as the toll on the firefighters who battle them. Each photograph is seared with either an orange glow or the ashy gray of the fallout.

These photographs show a small piece of the wreckage from fires in Northern California between 2019 to 2021. In 2019, the Kincade Fire destroyed 77,000 acres in Sonoma County, and by October 2021, the Caldor Fire claimed more than 200,000 acres in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Often it is a system of smaller blazes that combine and form complex fires, devastating regions across California.

–Kira Brunner Don