Capturing the Spirit of a City on Fire

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The photographer Andrew Friendly grew up on the west side of Los Angeles. From the relative safety of his studio apartment in Silver Lake, twenty miles to the east, he watched in horror as flames engulfed the city in early January. The fire, it seemed, was everywhere, and could go anywhere. Anemometers clocked eighty-mile-per-hour winds. It was tornado weather, plus burning embers. Within the first twenty-four hours, the coastal village of Pacific Palisades, where I lived, had been wiped out, as had the mountain enclave of Altadena: two disparate, historic communities, destroyed by two different fires, now indistinguishable in the aerial shots, the same gray ruined footprint of what was.

A young boy poses in new clothes he picked out at an Altadena Boys pop-up.

A boy balances several new toys.

Friendly and his older sister evacuated their parents from their home in Brentwood, a neighborhood adjacent to the Palisades which was in immediate danger. Then he began the vigil of the small screen, toggling between the Watch Duty app (which was downloaded more than two million times that week) and Instagram, where he tracked the path of destruction through the lives of his friends. Between the two conflagrations, thirteen thousand dwellings were destroyed, mine among them.

A volunteer barber gives a young boy a haircut at a charity event.

I left my home, in the Alphabet Streets of Pacific Palisades, on the morning of January 7th with a couple of overnight bags, two days’ worth of dog food, and my daughter’s final project for her English class, an album cover she’d designed in response to “The Giver.” By the morning of January 8th, everything we owned was gone. My salient and best memories of those sleepless, miserable first days revolve around the wild generosity that was on display. Friends filled suitcases with their own clothes for me; they Fed-Exed p.j.s and hoodies for the kids; my sister sent the only extant copy of a photo album filled with pictures of us as toddlers. A complete stranger, who learned through the new whisper network that I was running out of dog food, dropped a two-week supply at my hotel, one in a series we’d occupy over the next two months.

A makeup artist helps a girl skin-match products.

Newly donated suitcases are sorted by color at an Altadena Girls event.

With the fires still burning, and arsonists attempting to fan the chaos, the citizens of Los Angeles organized a large-scale relief effort. Companies, nonprofits, and individuals gave away clothing, hygiene products, suitcases, cosmetics, and toys to families who had lost everything. Discount codes flew through the ether; you could D.M. certain companies your sizes and they’d send a box of clothing to your new P.O. Box. At an event organized by Tower 28, a local beauty brand, whose founder owned a home in Pacific Palisades—my daughter got for Christmas, and lost weeks later, a setting powder from the brand called Palisades Pink—I filled a box with body wash and protein bars. On Abbott Kinney, a shopping street in Venice, lines poured out of Vuori, Frankies Bikinis, and Away. (Everyone needed a suitcase—or maybe a storage unit. Hotel rooms aren’t built for this.) Patagonia was offering a sixty-per-cent discount to those affected by the wildfires; there were always first responders in there when I went.

Two girls wait to pick out newly donated shoes to replace footwear they lost in the fires.

Girls pick out donated makeup supplies.

Online, personal accounts of loss gave way to stories about helping those in distress. Friendly, who’d been feeling helpless as he watched the apocalyptic news, observed this shift in his feed. “I was seeing all these donation sites and volunteer sites open up,” he told me. Someone posted a spreadsheet of places seeking volunteers. “I decided, I can’t sit here.” He went downtown, to 9ThirtyLA, an event space that had transformed into an evacuation and donation site, where he was assigned to sort offerings by category: water bottles, food, sanitary items, clothing for boys, clothing for girls. He found himself moved by the spirit of his fellow-volunteers, and decided to document the extraordinary moment in the city’s life.

Friendly shoots medium-format film, on a Pentax 645. “It really slows me down,” he said.“Everything becomes a lot more intentional. I’m taking one image, looking through the viewfinder and waiting for the moment and trying to capture that moment.” Over the next couple of weeks, he made his way down the list of volunteer sites, visiting as many as he could. At Altadena Girls a relief organization founded in the midst of the fires by a fourteen-year-old girl whose school had been destroyed, he said, each teen or tween was paired with a stylist and a makeup artist, who helped them rebuild their wardrobes and cosmetics collections. Meghan Markle and Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the First Partner of California, showed up; Gwyneth Paltrow sent product. The girls, Friendly said, were overwhelmed. “I saw lots of tears of gratitude and joy. These girls were getting brand-new stuff they probably couldn’t have afforded before. I heard some girls say that. I heard one of the stylists say, ‘Some of this stuff is nicer than anything I have.’ ”

Volunteers customize a new skateboard for a boy in Altadena.

A boy helps build skateboards for people who lost possessions in the fires.

Two boys show off their new skateboards.

A similar site, Altadena Boys, offered haircuts, streetwear, and custom skateboards.There was pizza and ice cream. People stayed, and ate, and chatted while the barbers and the customizers did their work. The lost community was reconstituted, if temporarily, as families compared notes on their evacuations, what they took and what they didn’t, and what the future might hold. Sometimes the line between the helpers and the helped was gray. “There were people at these sites who were volunteering who had lost homes during the fire,” Friendly said. “It was the only thing they could do to get out of of their heads was to be of service.”