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 8^th 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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