Thomas Alleman: The Fire This Time

Thomas Alleman: The Fire This Time by Aline SmithsonMay 4, 2025

©Thomas Alleman, Eaton Fire Aftermath – Altadena, CA. ONLY for display on LENSCRATCH.. NO OTHER USES WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER.

The new year started off with a depressive beginning when we entered 2025 with a change in Washington. But in Los Angeles, we weren’t expecting to add to that depression with the ravages of an angry environment. As the fires flattened the Palisades and then Altadena and other parts of Los Angeles, we wept for the losses of friends and neighbors, but we also experienced the relentless, unending potential of a city-wide spread of devastation as other friends and family were evacuating their homes and fires were cropping up everywhere. It was an emotional roller coaster of fear, horror, and worry.

I have not wanted to bring a visual to this devastation without purpose and reason, but when Thomas Alleman, a long time friend and croniclier of Los Angeles topography shared his photographs with me, I felt his work was a reminder of our fragile reality of living where fires and earthquakes are a reality. His project, The Fire This Time, springs from his years as a newspaper photographer and the need to document the results of this profound loss. These photographs build on his previous portfolios and his particular use of light and ways of seeing.

©Thomas Alleman, Eaton Fire Aftermath – Altadena, CA. ONLY for display on LENSCRATCH.. NO OTHER USES WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER.

Thomas Alleman was born and raised in Detroit, where his father was a traveling salesman and his mother was a ceramic artist. He graduated from Michigan State University with a degree in English Literature.

During a fifteen-year newspaper career, Tom was a frequent winner of distinctions from the National Press Photographer’s Association, as well as being named California Newspaper Photographer of the Year in 1995 and Los Angeles Newspaper Photographer of the Year in 1996. As a magazine freelancer, Tom’s pictures have been published regularly in Time, People, Business Week, Barrons, Smithsonian and National Geographic Traveler, and have also appeared in US News & World Report, Brandweek, Sunset, Harper’s and Travel Holiday. Tom has shot covers for Chief Executive, People, Priority, Acoustic Guitar, Private Clubs, Time, Diverse and Library Journal.

Tom exhibited Social Studies, a series of street photographs, widely in Southern California. Sunshine & Noir, a book-length collection of black-and-white urban landscapes made in the neighborhoods of Los Angeles, had its solo debut at the Afterimage Gallery in Dallas in 2006. Subsequent solo exhibitions include: the Robin Rice Gallery in New York in 2008 and 2013; the Blue Sky Gallery in Portland, OR, in 2009 and 2015; the Xianshwan Photo Festival in Inner Mongolia, China, in 2010; and the Duncan Miller Gallery in Los Angeles, February 2013. Fifty-three of Tom’s photographs of gay San Francisco, shot between 1985 and 1988, debuted at the Jewett Gallery in San Francisco in December, 2012, under the title, Dancing in the Dragon’s Jaws. The American Apparel debuted at the Redline Arts Center in Denver in 2015. The Nature of the Beast debuted at the 515 Gallery in Los Angeles in 2021.

Tom teaches “The Photographer’s Eye”, “Photographing in the Social Landscape”, and other courses at the Los Angeles Center of Photography.

Instagram: @thomasallemanphoto

©Thomas Alleman, Eaton Fire Aftermath – Altadena, CA. ONLY for display on LENSCRATCH.. NO OTHER USES WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER.

The Fire This Time

For most of the year, the Los Angeles Basin is cooled by breezes that blow across it from the Pacific Ocean. On a few occasions annually, for a few days only, high-pressure “Santa Ana” conditions change the direction of those winds, which issue instead from the desert east of LA, pushing through and passes and canyons of the Santa Monica and San Gabriel Mountains and down into foothill communities from Pasadena to Hollywood and beyond.

The evening of Tuesday, the 7^thof January, 2025, a Santa Ana windstorm rattled the Los Angeles basin with gales of sixty miles an hour and gusts as high as ninety. An electrical transformer near a gas station in Altadena is said to have sparked, creating a small brushfire that, in the circumstances, roared to life. Burning cinders blew into nearby neighborhoods, onto roofs and into gardens and the tall, mature trees that lined the residential streets off Lake Avenue; some cinders, it was reported, traveled a mile before landing, delivering the wildfire to every corner of the region.

A thousand acres burnt by midnight, and nine thousand more in the next ten hours. By noon on Wednesday, less than a day after the firestorm began, half of Altadena was gone: 9400 dwellings, several entire neighborhoods. Eighteen people were killed, all from black neighborhoods west of Lake Avenue––which, it appears, didn’t receive evacuation orders until several hours after their white neighbors did, on the east side of town. Three thousand firefighters spent the next three weeks bringing the fire under control.

©Thomas Alleman, Eaton Fire Aftermath – Altadena, CA. ONLY for display on LENSCRATCH.. NO OTHER USES WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER.

My photographs of the devastation to Altadena were made in neighborhoods on both sides of Lake Avenue. I began my work on January 22, two weeks after the fire began, and shot on-and-off until February 14^th.

As I toured them, those residential streets were empty of cars and people, eerily silent except for work crews who bantered across streets and yards. DWP crews repaired power-lines, and little gangs of FEMA and EPA investigators in hazmat suits combed the rubble for toxic stuff––EV batteries, heavy metals, asbestos––and LA county arborists inspected every sizable tree for its health and stability, marking thousands with day-glo “X”’s that doomed them to the chainsaw.

©Thomas Alleman, Eaton Fire Aftermath – Altadena, CA. ONLY for display on LENSCRATCH.. NO OTHER USES WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER.

The houses and yards I walked through were unguarded, despite the televised concerns of local police chiefs and mayors that looting was likely. Anyone following my footsteps through the rubble would’ve realized there was absolutely nothing there to loot. The devastation was complete, and awesome in its way. As any photographer might, I’d expected to find occasional picturesque objects, momento mori, in the ashes––a family picture, a rocking chair, a case of trophies––but all that had been obliterated, utterly, by the ferocious heat of the holocaust, as if a bomb had dropped.

©Thomas Alleman, Eaton Fire Aftermath – Altadena, CA. ONLY for display on LENSCRATCH.. NO OTHER USES WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER.

Young photographers are invariably drawn to ruins––objects and buildings and people worn down and devastated by time and tides. Old barns, ghost towns, crumbling houses, bums and bag-ladies. Some call that “ruin porn”: pictures that feed a base, insatiable appetite for scenes of destruction with extreme, “thrilling” images that’re devoid of empathy for the human experience of loss involved. I, for one, got all that out of my system a long time ago. I was nagged toward Altadena by other urges.

©Thomas Alleman, Eaton Fire Aftermath – Altadena, CA. ONLY for display on LENSCRATCH.. NO OTHER USES WITHOUT PERMISSION OF THE COPYRIGHT HOLDER.

Since 2016, I’ve been making photographs for a book called, “The Nature of the Beast”, which brings together several portfolios around a particular longtime interest of mine: the topography of Los Angeles, its many natural surfaces and features. Using techniques identical to those I brought to bear on these Altadena pictures, I’ve studied the LA River; the desert flora that pokes up through cracks and seams in our built environment; the crazy-quilt arrangement of houses, yards, fences and streets in LA’s older areas, and the freeways that cleave those neighborhoods in half. The photographic language I’ve developed to describe such micro-conditions––and the grammar that holds that catalog of visual ideas and motifs together––guided me through the work I did in Altadena. Though that Altadena portfolio is called FIRE (of course), it’s as much about the lessons of my larger story, my study of LA’s natural and man-altered surfaces, as it is about devastation and ruin. The heartbreaking events of early January, and their grim evidence underfoot, are surely foregrounded in my pictures––how could they not be?––but that larger story is a through-line that connects all my portfolios. These pictures bear a strong family resemble to all the others, and converse with them at every turn, and share common secrets of topography, human ambition, the veneer of civilization, the built environment, and the surfaces of things natural and unnatural.