Los Angeles is burning: Rick Castro on fleeing his home once again

While preparing for an upcoming exhibition titled Braver New World, photographer Rick Castro and all of Los Angeles received a red flag warning of a fire weather watch across Los Angeles and Ventura Counties on Sunday, January 5, in his East Hollywood home. “I know from living in LA my whole life, the Santa Ana winds are really intense; the power of the wind is not like normal,” Castro says. “The warning was, it was going to be historic and potentially catastrophic.”

Castro had already lived through the September 2020 Bobcat Fire, which raged for two weeks in September 2020, just miles from a small cabin that his family built during the late 1960s in the high desert area of Piñon Hills in San Bernardino County. Castro, who had been living there since the start of the pandemic, had to flee once more. “The fire came within 15 miles, but it was saved,” he says of the family home.

On Tuesday, January 7, shortly before 10:30am, the Palisades Fire ignited in the Santa Monica Mountains on the Pacific coast; at 6:18pm that evening, the Eaton Fire, an unrelated conflagration, began in the San Gabriel Mountains, much further inland. Later the Sunset Fire erupted. This fire was walking distance from the Hollywood Walk of Fame and Castro’s residence. The next day the Hurst, Kenneth, Lidia, and Archer Fires broke out. While investigations point to the source of the Palisades and Eaton Fires as downed power lines, both remain active, wreaking havoc as the most destructive fire in American history.

Castro remembers waking up the morning of the 8th to a black cloud hovering over Los Angeles. At 7:32am he texted his cousin with a photo of his front street: “Dude, this is apocalyptic scary. Where are you?” His cousin, who has a home in Piñon Hills, sent back a picture of the view: a pristine mountain top with a snow cap. “Ok, You sold me, I’m coming,” Rick replied. He hit the road by 8:30am, navigating a circuitous route around the fires. “LA is beyond gigantic,” he says. “To put it into perspective, the Palisades Fire is larger than Manhattan.”

Castro returned to his family’s cabin, not far from the Devil’s Punchbowl Natural Center, a “geological wonder” in the Angeles National Forest, which had been 95% destroyed during the Bobcat Fire. The charred, desecrated landscape became the inspiration for an apocalyptic vision of love, survival, and desire in a desolate realm that he made at the end of 2020, and later continued after securing his first grant in 2021.

Castro will be showing selections from the series in Braver New World, opening February 7 at the CDMX Art Festival in Mexico City. The exhibition, which takes its title from Aldous Huxley’s dystopian 1932 novel, features 16 works made between 1989–2022 that “depict the state of the State and things to come,” Castro says.

“The images are visual experiences of my life, the highs and lows from innocence to fear, beauty, lust, betrayal, and death,” he continues. “It’s apropos and ironic that the photos I shot of the fires at the end of 2020 are now a reality. They are more relevant than when I shot them, but it’s the same idea of global warming and how things can change in an instant.”

Rick Castro: Braver New World is on view February 7-9 will be represented by HGZ Galleria, during Mexico City Art Week. El Room, Edificio Humboldt, CDMX and other cities TBD. Contact Luis Piña.

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