Kevin Cooley takes photos of wildfires for a living. This week, Eaton Fire destroyed his Altadena home

Fire has never been a foreign concept in the life of Altadena-based photographer Kevin Cooley.

It's been a major theme across his work. His fine art photos have focused on smoke, explosions — including those he creates himself — and a man nicknamed the Wizard of Awe who made fireworks in Southern Minnesota.

For his day job, Cooley chases and captures wildfires in California for a photo agency and publications like the New York Times.

"It's hard not to want to go right to the fire, but I often want to find an angle to create an image, a scene where you put the fires within a larger context than the burning house, the burning building, the threat to people," he said.

One of his favorite pieces is a photo taken during the Woolsey Fire in 2018, which burned nearly 97,000 acres in L.A. and Ventura counties and prompted the evacuation of some 295,000 people.

Screenshot of the New York Times story where Kevin Cooley's photo was published.

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Courtesy Kevin Cooley

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The photo was shot on assignment for The New Yorker and was also used for a Times opinion piece. Taken at a house in the San Fernando Valley, the picture was uncannily Hockney-esque in its composition and symbolism.

"It's of a house with a swimming pool in the backyard, beautiful landscape with the fire just encroaching right over the wall behind it," he said. "In a way that's kind of like the end of the California dream."

A photo Kevin Cooley took during the Bobcat Fire in the San Gabriel Mountains above Los Angeles in 2020.

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Courtesy Kevin Cooley

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Cooley moved to Los Angeles from New York in 2012, and was already familiar with the city's tendency for destructive wildfires having gone on assignments to photograph them before.

His relationship to his subject deepened half a decade later, when the La Tuna Fire scorched some 7,200 acres — becoming the largest wildfire in the history of L.A., at the time.

That was 2017, and Cooley had just moved into his new home, barely a week or so in, when La Tuna came about a hundred yards from his house.

Instead of wary, he became more fascinated.

"The ecology of Southern California is the chaparral, and the chaparral needs to burn. You know, fire is part of that ecology. We live in its domain," Cooley said.

"That  really got me more interested in going to more fires," he said.

But, he added, " I much prefer to go to the fires than have them come to me."

At 10:30 a.m. on Tuesday, Jan. 7, a brush fire started in Pacific Palisades and grew exponentially over the course of the day, fanned by damaging Santa Ana winds unseen in a decade.

Kevin Cooley's new book, Wizard of Awe, is a compilation of photos he took of a man in Minnesota that makes smoke generators for big events.

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Courtesy Kevin Cooley

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Two photos inside Kevin Cooley's collection of photographs, Wizard of Awe. The West Coast launch of the book was postponed due to fires spreading across Los Angeles starting on Jan. 7.

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Courtesy Kevin Cooley

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That morning, Cooley was installing a gallery show in downtown Los Angeles for the West Coast book launch of Wizard of Awe, a collection of photos he took over the course of more than a decade of a man named Ken Miller, who made huge smoke generators at his Minnesota farm for airshows and other splashy events. Some of those photos were published in Popular Mechanics magazine. Those shots, and the accompany story, landed Miller in prison for violating federal explosive laws.

Miller was scheduled to fly out to L.A. to join this weekend's book launch.

But as the Palisades Fire grew in strength, Cooley got a call to go on assignment.

So he left the gallery and headed out.

From Kevin Cooley's "Controlled Burns" series.

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Courtesy Kevin Cooley

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" I've done enough where you can kind of get a sense of, you know,   looking at different resources and angles from fire cameras. It's like, 'OK, that's a fire. I got to go.' And you just go," he said. "That was the Palisades that day."

He and a friend spent hours out in the Palisades shooting the unprecedented blaze — until he got a call from his wife saying that a fire had broken out near Eaton Canyon and was growing fast.

" I could tell from the photograph that she sent from our house that it was like, 'We got to get back right now.' It was already that intense," Cooley said.

They hauled back to Altadena and saw firsthand what was happening to his neighborhood.

" I thought the [Palisades Fire] was the most intense fire I've ever been on until I got back to Altadena.  And that was more intense, at least for me, because it's my community," he said.

Cafe de Leche, a small coffee shop on Lake Avenue in Altadena, destroyed by the Eaton Fire.

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Courtesy Kevin Cooley

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Cooley, his wife and their 10-year-old son evacuated from their duplex near  the intersection of El Molino Avenue and Morada Place, straddling the border of Altadena and Pasadena, at about 5 a.m. Wednesday.

Once they settled into their friend's Bungalow Heaven home in Pasadena for shelter, Cooley headed back north.

 "Being the fire photographer that I am, I couldn't sit and I went back straight to my house and it was already on fire," he said.

Kevin Cooley and his family's Altadena duplex consumed by the Eaton Fire on the morning of Jan. 8.

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Courtesy Kevin Cooley

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Another view of the Cooley home.

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Courtesy Kevin Cooley

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A wall of fire was close to engulfing his car.

"I figured I probably should go," Cooley said.

The veteran fire photographer said after leaving his home: "I just went around the neighborhood like I always do, except I knew all the houses."

By early Wednesday morning, on Jan. 8, just hours after the start of Eaton Fire in Altadena, Cooley and his family has lost their home — along with so many people in the area.

He went to Instagram and posted a video of his house being ripped apart by the flames.

The next morning, one of the photographs he took of the Palisades Fire was published in the New York Times.

Cooley was showing me that shot in the backyard of his friend's Pasadena home that afternoon — while ashes from the fires burning across Los Angeles fell from the sky around us.

A screenshot of the New York Times opinion piece where Kevin Cooley's Palisades Fire photo was used.

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He said he isn't sure what's next, what's going to happen, where he and his family are going to go, or whether they'll stay in L.A.

But he did say living with wildfires has become part of living in this city.

"If there's an earthquake, it's not gonna be like we weren't informed. People who live on the beach, [it's not like they] aren't aware that the sea is coming," Cooley said. "It's just all part of our living in this 21st century."

Because so much of Los Angeles teeters at the edge of paradise lost.

Kevin Cooley in front of his Altadena home destroyed by the Eaton Fire.

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Aaron Giesel

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Courtesy Kevin Cooley

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The West Coast book launch of Wizard of Awe has been rescheduled:

KEVIN COOLEY | THE WIZARD OF AWE
These Days
Location: 118 Winston St., Los Angeles
Event: Artist Reception + book signing: Jan. 18, 7 - 9 p.m.
Exhibition dates: Jan. 18 - Feb. 1