I am extremely honored to announce that Dr. Rebecca Senf from the Center of Creative Photography has selected the above photograph for exhibition in the Houston Center for Photography’s 42nd Annual Center Exhibition. It opens Thursday June 12, 2025, and closes on Sunday August 17th, 2025.
My Eaton Fire Portfolio began on January 7th, 2025, when a fire started in Eaton Canyon (above Pasadena and East of Altadena) and quickly spread because of unusually high winds. I have chronicled details in previous blog posts and my web page for the portfolio. I knew right away I was witnessing something historic, and I felt compelled to document it. I was initially focused on the fire and the destruction but as I have returned over 25 different days since the fire I find I am document more individual loss and how people are dealing with the aftermath. I also soon recognized the destructive nature of the fire left behind many forms and shapes that were beautiful and often powerful. In January I was already taking notice of the frames within a frame caused by the fire. The image above is from a home in the Jane’s Village neighborhood of Altadena. The diamond shape to the right was a window that burned away allowing the viewer to see the brick fireplace. The rectangles on the left side of the image are a covered porch, a front window and a rear window. The exposure was around sunset causing the hue cast. What remains of the home address numbers are the black or grey blobs to the lower left of the diamond window as you face it. Altadena is a wonderfully eclectic and diverse community covering 12 square miles North of the City of Pasadena. Altadena lost over 9,000 structures in the fires.
The Center Annual is Houston Center for Photography’s yearly group exhibition that seeks to highlight and provide insight into current themes, technologies, and practices in photography. This year’s exhibition features 47 diverse works from members of our global photography community and was selected by a Dr. Rebecca Senf who is Chief Curator at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona, in Tucson. Her B.A. in Art History is from the University of Arizona; her M.A. and Ph.D. were awarded by Boston University. In 2012, her book Reconstructing the View: The Grand Canyon Photographs of Mark Klett and Byron Wolfe was released by University of California Press; in 2017, her book To Be Thirteen, showcasing the work of Betsy Schneider, was published by Radius Press and Phoenix Art Museum. She has curated fifty exhibitions, including her recent Richard Avedon: Relationships which was shown in Milan and Palermo, Italy and Rotterdam, in The Netherlands, and has contributed chapters, interviews, and essays to over a dozen publications. Senf is an Ansel Adams scholar, and in 2020 released a book on Adams’s early years, called Making a Photographer, copublished by the CCP and Yale University Press, now in a second printing.
Dr. Senf & CCP’s recent Instagram post: “Picture Party: Celebrating the Collection at 50,” on view through December 20, 2025, at CCP’s Alice Chaiten Baker Interdisciplinary Gallery.
The Houston Center for Photography galleries are always free and open to the public.
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