Review Santa Fe: Barron Bixler: And Hell Followed

Review Santa Fe: Barron Bixler: And Hell Followed by Epiphany KnedlerFebruary 7, 2026

©Barron Bixler, Lachman Lane, Pacific Palisades, July 2025

In early November 2025, I was invited to CENTER’s Review Santa Fe. Being my first time in the Southwest and experience on the Reviewer side of the table, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. As an educator, I love reviewing work; when others hear “critique,” they may shy away, but I love the experience of helping others through their ideas. Review Santa Fe is an incredibly welcoming experience, carefully cultivating meaningful projects and conversations. Living in a very rural area, this was an inspiring opportunity to see what is on the horizon of the photo world. I’m so excited to share a few of these projects over the first week of February.

Today, we’ll be sharing Barron Bixler’s And Hell Followed: Digging Out in the Palisades Fire Burn Zone.

©Barron Bixler, Luis, Pacific Palisades, March 2025

Barron Bixler is a social-environmental documentary photographer, filmmaker, designer, writer and curator. He is co-founder and creative director of Princeton University’s Blue Lab, an environmental media production studio, and holds an appointment at Princeton in the Effron Center for the Study of America. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.

Since 2006, Bixler has chronicled a range of environmental problems—from water and wildfire to mining and industrial agriculture to overfishing and anti-GMO seed activism. His multifaceted creative practice explores the collisions of—and interstices between—urban, industrial, rural and wild lands to tell stories about the complex ways in which people shape, and are shaped by, the places they call home.

He is a 2025 finalist for the New Jersey State Council on the Arts individual artist fellowship. Recently, his work has been included at Review Santa Fe, American Photographic Artists, the New York Portfolio Review, FotoFest Houston and the International Juried Exhibition at the Center for Photographic Art in Carmel, CA.

Bixler is a founding member of the Los Angeles-based arts collective Project 51, which was awarded a major grant by ArtPlace America for its public art and engagement project Play the LA River. His photographs, writings, and other art and design projects have appeared in High Country News, Dwell, Analog Forever Magazine, BOOM: A Journal of California, Gastronomica: The Journal for Food Studies, Civil Eats, aPhotoEditor, Fraction Magazine, KCET Artbound, LAist, KUSC Arts Alive, The Fresno Bee and The Stockton Record.

A self-taught photographer, Bixler holds an MA in English from the University of Victoria.

Follow Barron on Instagram: @barronbixler

©Barron Bixler, Paskenta Road, Pacific Palisades, March 2025

And Hell Followed: Digging Out in the Palisades Fire Burn Zone

My coverage of the cleanup of the Palisades Fire burn zone spanned the critical period from early March to mid-July 2025. Central to the project are photos of and conversations with the men—mostly Latino and from industrial communities on the south and east sides of LA—who carried out the dangerous work of clearing almost a million tons of debris and toxic ash.

Media coverage of the Palisades Fire’s aftermath understandably has centered on the fire’s devastating impact on residents, alongside stories about firefighters, scientists, politicians and real estate speculators. With all that, the faces and voices of the cleanup workers themselves have had little visibility—an omission I hope this project will help rebalance.

The men pictured here endured hellish working conditions with bravery and a commitment to helping their wealthier neighbors put their lives back together. Their time in the burn zone almost certainly will carry longterm consequences for their physical and emotional health. And Hell Followed offers an urgent, intimate perspective on the human cost of fire recovery—against a backdrop of worsening climate disaster and political persecution of immigrant communities across the U.S.

©Barron Bixler, Whitfield Avenue, Pacific Palisades, March 2025

Epiphany Knedler: How did your project come about?

Barron Bixler: This is kind of a long answer, but my path to the project was winding! I was visiting LA and wanted to see if our old house in Altadena had survived the Eaton Fire. This was early March 2025. By some miracle it did. But starting just a couple blocks north it looked like an atom bomb had detonated. Altadena was simply gone.

The next day, on the other side of LA, I talked my way into the Palisades Fire burn zone. I needed to see it with my own eyes, you know, to reckon with the intensity of this new epoch of climate vulnerability we’re in. I was wandering on foot and stopped in front of the first house on the block to be demolished. I struck up a conversation with one of the crew members—most of whom are Latino guys from industrial communities on the south and east sides of LA. It blew my mind. He’s standing knee-deep in toxic ash and twisted wreckage, it’s raining and cold, just miserable, and he’s telling me how he hopes his work will help the residents of the Pacific Palisades heal from the disaster and put the pieces of their lives back together. I was moved by how selflessly he considered his role in this calamity. I asked if I could take his picture, just as an expression of thanks. I dashed back to the car and grabbed my camera. And after taking that first portrait, I kept at it.

©Barron Bixler, Temescal Canyon Road, Pacific Palisades, May 2025

EK: Is there a specific image that is your favorite or particularly meaningful to this series?

BB: I love the close-range portraits of the workers because they emerged out of these generous, challenging, revelatory conversations I was having in the liminal terrain of the burn zone. As a standalone image though, the half-melted, green-and-orange squirt gun is a good one. The Palisades Fire burned so hot it melted cars and fused them to the street. But somehow that squirt gun survived on its little scrap of flagstone. Remarkable.

©Barron Bixler, Raul, Pacific Palisades, May 2025

EK: Can you tell us about your artistic practice?

BB: I work across still photography, design, writing, public art and—most recently—filmmaking. I’m also creative director at Princeton University’s Blue Lab, which is an environmental media production studio I co-founded with my wife in 2021. The thread that weaves all of this work together is my interest in exploring the complex ways that people shape, and are shaped by, the places they call home. Some of these social-environmental interactions are tender, some destructive. I like to make work in the tense space between. And I find that working across mediums affords me tools and methods to tell multi-layered stories at different scales and crafted for different kinds of audiences or contexts. I’m really lucky to be doing this work.

©Barron Bixler, Whitfield Avenue, Pacific Palisades, May 2025

EK: What’s next for you?

BB: I’m excited to be working on a feature-length documentary film, California on the Edge, that considers how climate change, pollution and other environmental stressors are damaging ecosystems and upending lifeways up and down the California coastline. The central question of the film is speculative: what kind of future are we going to build out of the wreckage of our current moment? We’ll be in production on that through 2026. Then I have a couple of completed photo projects that I’ll be trying to get out into the world. I’m working on a new photo project based in New Jersey about the chemical industry. At Blue Lab, we’re releasing the second seasons of our three original podcasts, and are cooking up some other stuff I’m really proud of. At this point, I’m not sure if I’m spinning the plates or if the plates are spinning me.

Recently, High Country News published this project as a photo essay to mark the one-year anniversary of the Palisades and Eaton Fires in Los Angeles. You can view an expanded version of the project at Blue Lab.

©Barron Bixler, Gustavo, Pacific Palisades, May 2025

Epiphany Knedler is an interdisciplinary artist + educator exploring the ways we engage with history. She graduated from the University of South Dakota with a BFA in Studio Art and a BA in Political Science and completed her MFA in Studio Art at East Carolina University. She is based in Aberdeen, South Dakota, serving as an Assistant Professor of Art and Coordinator of the Art Department at Northern State University, a Content Editor with LENSCRATCH, and the co-founder and curator of the art collective Midwest Nice Art. Her work has been exhibited in the New York Times, the Guardian, Vermont Center for Photography, Lenscratch, Dek Unu Arts, and awarded through Lensculture, the Lucie Foundation, F-Stop Magazine, and Photolucida Critical Mass.
Follow Epiphany on Instagram: @epiphanysk

Tags: And Hell Followed, Barron Bixler, California, CENTER, Environment, Fire, LA, nature, Palisades, Review Santa Fe