
The sign at the entrance of the town of Paradise, on Skyway road. At the back, the new sign installed after Camp Fire, indicating the rebuilding of the town.

Tina Balasek, 57, poses in front of the shed she built and decorated herself on the piece of land she recently acquired in Paradise to build her new home. Tina used to rent a mobile home, and was able to acquire this land thanks to a connection of hers. « I used to rent and lost everything. My house wasn’t properly insured because of a few trees that had to be taken down as they were too close to it. My entire house burnt down, but ironically, those trees still stand. »

1081 Elliot road. The land cleaning process is almost complete, the trunks of the last trees that had to be taken down are being burnt in order to prepare the space for rebuilding. At the back, the trailers that Paradise inhabitants live in, while they rebuild their homes.

Jim McCurdy’s wood workshop survived Camp Fire. « It was the only building still standing on my land. When we came back in the days that followed the fire, and I saw my workshop still there, I saw a sign that we had to come back and rebuild. »

Jim and Angela McCurdy in the trailer they live in a few days a week while rebuilding their house. The rest of the time they rent a house in Chico, the nearest town. « But people are crazy over there. And now that there aren’t any trees anymore in front of my future house, I can watch sunset every day from my porch if I feel like it. » Angela now has anxiety crises because of Camp Fire, so she currently can’t work. She hopes they will reduce with time…

The car cemetery on Skyway road, where the cars that were burnt on the road are gathered. The town inhabitants trying to escape were caught in a traffic jam on the only road that they could take to leave town, and were surrounded by the fire. Many were burnt alive in their cars.

Chip and Kellie Gorley’s house. « A friend is helping us rebuild it for a fraction of the cost we would have paid if we’d hired builders on the market. Once the main work is done, I can finish the electrical and smaller work myself, this is the job I do. », says Chip.

Fire department station n°1, Birch street. Paradise is divided into 14 zones, each with their fire station. An evacuation protocol had been designed and was to be activated in case of a fire, but the automated text message alerts didn’t have the expected impact, because part of the town inhabitants still hadn’t activated that service and therefore didn’t receive them.
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PARADISE (ONGOING)
Camp Fire devastated Paradise, a town of the foothills of the Sierra Nevada in California, in November 2018. This mega-fire killed 86 people and pushed 20,000 others to flee across the United States. Far from being an isolated phenomenon, it ranks at the top of the largest fires that regularly affect California and no longer spare any region of the globe, as recently witnessed in Brazil and Australia.
I heard about Paradise a year later and departed to meet some of the 2,000 souls who are rebuilding their lives there. Its name caught my attention as a symbol, which could become common: idyllic places we are used to living in, suddenly becoming inhospitable. Paradise is a fable about the effort to revive a world from the ashes. A feverish activity that is reminiscent of that of the gold diggers who, according to the legend, came to play at Pair o ’Dice, the saloon that the city is believed to have been called after. There is a certain charm in looking for Eden on Earth there, but none of the majestic trees remain, nor any of the 19,000 houses nestled comfortably under their thick twigs. The pioneers who embark on the (re)conquest of a ravaged nature remain aware of the increasingly tangible risks to which they are exposed.
I wanted to explain this insistence on refusing the limits, even imposed in the most brutal way by nature and flames. As the days went by, I photographed the traces of a still visible recent past, in order to make a portrait of this place and those who have returned. They chose to rebuild their wooden house there to escape another hell, that of pollution, of overcrowded cities. I decided to give a personal vision and suggest the collective hallucination experienced by its inhabitants, forced to flee and leave their lives behind in less than two hours. Using a color film process now almost extinct allows me to capture the light beyond the visible, in the infrared spectrum, on the devastated landscapes that still bear the marks of the fire.
Paradise suggests the next place, Australia or another, which will have to go through this slow process of healing after a natural disaster. This fable suggests our ever greater disconnection from nature, our hubris of wanting to go against it at all costs. Paradise, a prophetic, apocalyptic place?