Burn Line

Burn Line responds to the LA wildfires through community-submitted photographs. Using pyrolysis, these “Pyrotypes” are etched into wood and converted into charcoal, turning destruction into a material language of memory and collective witness.

Burn Line responds to the emotional aftermath of the California wildfires—grief, displacement, and the fragile persistence of memory. In an era of environmental fragmentation, the project explores the "burn line" not just as a boundary of destruction, but as a threshold for new models of collective resilience.

The work centers on a community practice: "Pyrotypes" are a new photographic process created from photographs submitted by fire survivors. These images are translated into toolpaths, CNC-etched into construction lumber, and transformed into charcoal through controlled pyrolysis. By allowing the same elemental force that caused the crisis to physically complete the image, the process shifts photography from mere representation to a material witness. The fire does not simply erase; it integrates the trauma into the very structure of the work.

These Pyrotypes function as scattered markers of personal history. When brought together, they create a network of shared experience, bridging the gap between individual loss and collective memory. Alongside my own black-and-white landscape photographs of burn sites, the installation creates a space for dialogue between the scorched terrain and the domestic lives altered by it. The use of charcoal—historically associated with both ritual purification and the earliest marks of human expression—suggests that even within the heart of a crisis, there is a path toward renewal.

Burn Line moves beyond the documentation of climate catastrophe to ask how photography can serve as a site of collective renewal—weaving individual threads of loss into a shared framework for the future.