Preface

This is a photobook born from the ashes of photobooks, created on the ground of loss itself.

 

In one roaring breath, the Eaton fire rendered my family’s home of thirty-plus years into smoke. That house in Altadena was our place of being for three generations. Within it lived my life’s work, captured on silver and celluloid, proof of us, of here, of then. The fire returned every negative and print to light and shadow. A silence inhabited where there had once been a chorus.

 

In the aftermath, I walked the footprint of my life on scorched ground. The loss was a physical presence. I knew art would be the path through desolation, but I did not yet know the vocabulary.

 

Then I saw the ashes. They were not debris. They were the compressed remains of every photobook that had shaped my vision. Here were Irving Penn, Gordon Parks, Dawoud Bey, reduced to their essential carbon yet somehow holding their form. Here was material evidence of a past life, evidence that echoed how fragile cultural memory can be, especially in Black communities where archives are too easily destroyed, dispersed, or ignored.

 

Fire erases what was and interrupts what might have been. This work is a visual excavation, and a form of testimony. I return to the exact location where the house stood, gathering the ash where it fell and carrying it to where it may have lived. On that scarred earth, I reconstitute the remains. I press the carbon into book-like forms that remember their former selves.

 

These reconstructed volumes sit on pedestals like specimens in an outdoor laboratory of memory. Their surfaces map the journey from knowledge to ash to knowledge again. You can see the ghost of pages in their stratified faces, the phantom text in their broken spines, all under the same sky that watched them burn. Each photograph marks transformation: the ash blocks retain the proportions and presence of books while they become monuments of pressure, heat, and memory, rooted in the exact soil of their destruction. I gather and rebuild while the land bears witness. The process becomes an archaeological ceremony. Each frame documents this act on the site of the loss.

 

The camera captures not just objects but ritual, the deliberate making of form from formlessness on consecrated ground. This book’s materials and pacing are restrained to carry this residue, slowing the reader into contact with ash-as- image.The work transforms the site of erasure into a site of witness, making form from what remains when everything else is gone. The land becomes collaborator, the burnt foundation becomes studio, the ritual becomes the work.

 

The fire took everything and gave back one thing: the irreducible matter of memory itself, returned to its home ground. These photographs document the only way to witness a loss that otherwise leaves no trace. They enact restoration on the very earth that holds the wound.