With the sun setting and the winds howling on January 7, Houri Marganian and her family raced out of their Altadena neighborhood as the Eaton Fire exploded a mile away, believing they’d never see their home again. They hastily stuffed Marganian’s collection of thousands of family photos, neatly organized in about a dozen boxes, into the trunk of her husband’s car.
“He left the neighborhood,” says Marganian, and then “the trunk popped open.”
The boxes tumbled out and the ferocious winds did the rest, scattering decades of non-digitized photos in all directions.
“I was trying to collect them with my 12-year-old as the wind was blowing, suffocating us with the smoke, and we could see the embers coming down,” Marganian recalls. “Everything was happening so fast because of the wind.”
They gathered just a fraction of the photos before they had to keep moving.
At first, Marganian considered posting something online about the lost pictures. But after seeing the full extent of the devastation in Altadena, and receiving confirmation that her own home survived, the photos seemed less important.
Then, she began getting some very surprising text messages.
“Someone has your pictures up on their social media,“ Marganian recalls reading. “Random pictures, like honeymoon pictures, pregnancy pictures, dating pictures.”
Through the efforts of Altadena resident Claire Schwartz, about 200 of those lost photos have been returned. Some of the prints she got back, including images of her childhood in Lebanon, were damaged by smoke, soot, and car tires.
Marganian is grateful.
“I met some great people through this whole experience, and I’m just glad our house is here,” Marganian says. “My heart goes out to the ones that weren’t as fortunate.”
Claire Schwartz, an Altadena resident, has made it her mission to help reunite those kinds of keepsakes with their owners. Surprisingly, the fierce Santa Ana winds that whipped the Palisades and Eaton Fires into deadly infernos in January spared many precious things you’d think would have been the first to burn: old family photos, postcards, yearbook pages, old sheet music, and kids’ art.
Schwartz and her partner live in South Altadena, not far from the Pasadena border. Their home survived, but many others on their block did not.
Schwartz says she feels like she’s doing something productive for her neighbors, who may feel powerless or overwhelmed in the fire’s aftermath.
“It’s not putting a roof over anybody’s head, but it maybe is bringing back a little bit of normalcy or comfort to somebody who might really need it,” she says. “That’s been helpful, feeling like I can help somebody else right now.”
Claire Schwartz's Eaton Fire Found Photos project uses social media to reunite found photos with their owners. Courtesy of Steven Cuevas.
On a recent morning, Schwartz stopped by a home in North Pasadena, where Nina Raj gingerly handed her a folded piece of paper. Schwartz carefully slipped it inside a plastic bag.
The treasure? A two-sided drawing that Raj found in her backyard after the fire. A crayon-and-felt-pen sketch of thick intersecting lines, a red and brown stick figure, and a couple of abstract little squiggles in black. On one side, the word “Adonis.” On the other: “Joseph.”
A drawing created by a kindergartener named Adonis blew into Nina Raj's backyard during the Eaton Fire. Photo by Steven Cuevas.
Raj is one of many Altadena and Pasadena residents who have contacted Schwartz after seeing Instagram posts on her Eaton Fire Found Photos page, launched just days after the fire.
“People … just message me and say, ‘Hey, I found this,’ and we schedule a time for me to come by and pick it up,” Schwartz explains.
Most of what Schwartz has rescued are precious family photos. “I clean [them], put [them] in a nice safe glassine envelope, acid free, so nothing affects the integrity of the photograph, then I post it,” she says.
After several days, Schwartz was able to locate Adonis, the artist, who turned out to be a kindergartener. The owner of Side Pie, a Grateful Dead-themed pizzeria destroyed in the fire, saw Schwartz’s social media post, and remembered that his daughter went to school with a kid named Adonis. It was a match.
Schwartz was able to track down both Adonis and Joseph, the recipient of Adonis’ drawing. Great news but offset with some bad.
“Adonis, the artist, his family home burned. Joseph’s [family’s] home is still there. But they’re in the process of remediation, so everyone’s displaced,” says Schwartz.
Schwartz’s project isn’t the first to rescue photography from the devastation of wildfire. Norma Quintana, a photographer based in Napa whose family lost their home in the 2017 Tubbs Fire, says the wind helped save treasured objects during the Eaton Fire. “The wind was a gift,” Quintana says.
To cope with her grief and trauma, Quintana spent weeks sifting the ashes of her property and painstakingly photographing things that survived or barely survived. The work evolved into an exhibit of photographs and blackened keepsakes called Forage from Fire, shown in museums across the U.S. and Mexico.
She sees a kind of magic in the Eaton Fire Found Photos project:
“It doesn’t matter what shape [a photo or letter is] in. What’s important is that it holds an emotional connection. The fire may affect the physical part of that object, but it doesn’t take away the memory.”
Those fleeting moments, captured on film in a split second, can remind us of a childhood experience, a lost love, or a beloved relative.
“The photo really is the most tangible connection,” says Schwartz. “It’s the closest we can get to going back in time and revisiting a precious moment in our life.”