A new photo project with work from Sofia Coppola, Jack Antonoff and more raises money for wildfire victims.
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The deer look pensive, almost like they know what’s coming.
In “Family,” a black-and-white photograph from director Spike Jonze, two of the animals look straight into the camera while a third looks up at one of them, framed on a hillside overlooking a palm tree and downtown skyscrapers. Nature and urbanity uncomfortably thrust together — part of the allure and danger of Los Angeles.
After the devastating wildfires in January, such scenes are on a lot of Angelenos’ minds. But so is vibrant escapism, after the barrage of destruction we all witnessed. California Picture Project, a new all-star, fine-art photo series and fundraiser from a group of L.A. music executives and creative directors, makes room for all of it.
“When it initially happened, I think we were all shell-shocked,” said Niki Roberton, the senior vice president of creative for RCA Records. “It displaced friends, parents at our daughter’s school had lost their homes. We were desperate to find a way to volunteer. But we had Spike Jonze and Sofia Coppola and Dave Free, these incredible creatives that were keen to join us. This was the most immediate way for our skill sets to be able to help.”
Mikael Wood and August Brown were at Inglewood’s Intuit Dome and Kia Forum for the FireAid benefit concerts starring Billie Eilish, Lady Gaga, Green Day and Stevie Wonder, among many others.
The series of prints — all up for purchase at $150 from Feb. 28 to March 9 — collects dozen of donated images from dozens of fine-art photographers (Richard Kern, Petra Collins) and musicians (Kim Gordon, Jack Antonoff).
Some of the images are genuinely haunting documents of the disaster itself. Martine Syms’ “Luctor et Emergo” shows a burned-out fireplace from a charred home, spray-painted with “Mama Didn’t Raise No Quitters,” while Maddy Rotman’s “Emily Outside the Altadena House” portrays a pregnancy in a neighborhood now synonymous with destruction.
But a lot of the shots are pure abstractions or low-stakes celebrity snapshots. For mid-aughts nostalgists, you can take home a Cobrasnake portrait of Paris Hilton or Theo Liu’s snap of Kylie Jenner being eaten by a huge bug.
Some are easygoing portraits of André 3000 playing flute for awed school kids or fashion icon Rick Owens lounging in a giant unmade bed; there’s Danny Trejo eating grapes in a Nadia Lee Cohen frame or Moses Sumney in a rich black-and-white self portrait. Others draw from A-list creative directors like Stillz (known for working with Bad Bunny) or designer Wales Bonner.
In a cruel coincidence, the Palisades and Eaton fires wiped out two neighborhoods with unique significance in L.A.’s music industry.
The fires will be an enormous subject for art in the years to come, as they claimed two neighborhoods with significant ties to the music and creative industries. Famed recording studios and working-class artists’ homes burned in Pacific Palisades and Altadena. As brutal as the fires were, they did prompt a major effort from within the music industry to help rebuild lives, including the massive FireAid benefit concert and a Grammys focused on recovery.
“It was such a weird, crazy, scary way to start the year.” said Joe Mortimer, a creative executive at Capitol Records. “Especially in a city that can feel very disconnected, I think suddenly people felt very connected. It kind of went from this fear and uncertainty to optimism around the community, and then optimism of what can we do to help and leverage with our experience in what we do.”
The point of California Picture Project was not so much to document the destruction but to raise a ton of money to donate to the California Community Foundation Wildfire Recovery Fund while reflecting the varied, global vantage points of artists with ties to L.A. They’re batting around plans to turn the project into a book, but for now, a few might even be candidates to hang on a wall. Oliver Hadlee Pearch’s “Lyndsey Wixson, LA,” shows a beaming woman sitting in a car, bursting to the brim with flowers.
“Ultimately, the goal of this is to raise as much money as possible, but within the context of everything that’s been going on here,” said Cameron Parkins, an artist manager with All Our Dreams. “It’s a fine line to walk, but the photographers did something really amazing within that.”
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