The New Yorker:

The photographer Andrew Friendly watched Los Angeles burn, and then come together.

By Dana Goodyear

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.

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.

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