TRIAL BY FIRE

Los Angeles is said to have no seasons, but what it does have is what Joan Didion called “the weather of catastrophe, of apocalypse.” Photojournalist STUART PALLEY turned his camera on this year’s wildfires and shares his account of devastation and resilience

Stuart Palley

I WAS AT MY cabin in Joshua Tree right before the wind started up. The air was totally still, the sky was clear, the stars were sparkling. My gut was telling me this was the calm before the storm. In this case, it was a firestorm. Over the years, I have photographed what the Santa Ana winds can do. The gales that regularly blast through Los Angeles are legendary, and—with barely a drop of rain in Southern California in eight months—the land was tinderbox dry and primed for an inferno. That’s exactly what happened the next day. Many times over. The first of the two major conflagrations, the Palisades fire, had erupted before I began driving my pickup back to LA on January 7. By the time I got home to…

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Vanity Fair UK (Digital) - 1 Issue, April 2025

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