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Photographer Andrew Friendly grew up on the West Side of Los Angeles. From the relative safety of his studio in Silver Lake, twenty miles to the east, he watched in horror as the city burned in early January. The flames seemed to be everywhere, and they could spread anywhere. Wind gauges recorded winds of eighty miles an hour. It was tornado weather, complete with smoldering embers. Within the first twenty-four hours, the Pacific Palisades coastal community where I lived was as completely devastated as the mountain enclave of Altadena: two disparate historic communities, destroyed by separate fires, now indistinguishable in aerial photographs, leaving only a gray remnant of what once was.
The boy poses in new clothes he picked out at the Altadena Boys store.
The boy holds several new toys.
Friendly and his older sister led their parents out of their home in Brentwood, a neighborhood adjacent to the Palisades that was in immediate danger. Then he began to stare at his screen, switching between the Watch Duty app (which had been downloaded more than two million times that week) and Instagram, where he was following the progress of the destruction in his friends’ lives. Between the two fires, thirteen thousand homes had been destroyed, including mine.
Sourse: newyorker.com
