Humane Storytelling in a Crisis

I had already decided I would start following that larger story when I saw the city of Los Angeles on fire that first night (Jan 7, 2025) and started packing my bags for the airport.

I went from frontline to frontline from the first morning of the conflagration, documenting one apocalyptic scene after another, but eventually found a beating heart beyond the spectacle and I found a way to bring it through the nois ethat fills our cellphone scrolling in moments of crisis like these.

I found human stories and told then in both photographic still and followup interviews. On January 9th, as news anchors narrated the progress of a wall of flame descending into Mandeville Canyon, far below, hundreds of prisoners trained as firefighters, were cutting a line through the night like a human bulldozer, removing all vegetation in a twenty-foot-wide strip to stop it from spreading to the homes nearby. In the trenches, as fires flared in the chaparral with each gust of wind, and helicopters dropped loads of water on our heads, the soundscape was dominated by chainsaws and chopper blades and rockfall. Up and down near-vertical pitches I followed them as they battle through the night.

I need a story now about hows in this moment I found real peopel to connect with, whose stries could be amplified and I began telling them one to one in a short daily video series that reached tens of millions of viewers, breaking through the algorithm far beyond my audience.