I am honored that the above print is included in the Selects 2025 exhibition which will open this month at the Atlanta Photography Group gallery.
The exhibition was curated by Arpad Kovacs who is associate curator in the Department of Photographs at the J. Paul Getty Museum. Kovacs selected 30 photographs for the Selects 2025 Exhibition.
All work in this exhibition will be considered for the APG/Museum of Fine Arts, Houston Purchase Award, a $3,000 prize which is made possible through a generous grant from Edwin Robinson and Julin Maloof, in honor of Gloria and Ted Maloof. Lisa Volpe, Curator of Photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston will make the decision for the museum purchase award.
The Image
This image is from my Eaton Fire Portfolio which I began on January 7th this year. This is the second time I have exhibited this image in print form and the four time this year I have exhibited a photograph from my Eaton Fire Portfolio.
I was in Pasadena, where I grew up, the night the devastating Eaton Canyon Fire began. I smelled the smoke from the fire before I could see the flames and when I first saw the fire it was raging. I have written a lot about this portfolio on my website and in this blog, so I won’t repeat too much about it here. It was a devastating fire that killed at least 19 people and destroyed over 9,000 homes. I have continued photographing the area since the night of the fire to document the impact on the community and the massive scope of the damage.
This photograph is of the Altadena Community Church which is near the intersection of Lake Avenue and Altadena Drive, arguably the center of the city. Many businesses near this intersection were lost but the entire Southwest corner was spared. For me there are lots of layers of information in this image. A destroyed church represents the impact to the community as a whole. I love the fact the archway stood strong and was such a powerful element in the image (it was just razed within the last week), and the mountain (where the fire started) are an important element. The image encompasses a lot about the fire. I photographed this church several times over the past six months, as have other photographers, but I have not seen any other photographs of the church as powerful as this image. The key is the lighting; I photographed this image on February 18th when the sun was further south and still shone on the face of the building. I also made the exposure around sunset when the colors came through. A month later the sun was further north in the sky and the light was not hitting the face of the building during sunset.
July 29, 2025 - The Altadena Community Church lot. The facade had been razed within the last week. (DSC 3666)
The Print:
The exhibition print has an image size of 24” x 16” which is the largest sized exhibition print I have produced so far in an edition (I have produced some larger prints for commercial clients). This print is on a sheet of 26” x 18” Hahnemȕhle Photo Rag Ultrasmooth paper, framed with a window matt to an external size of approximately 31” x 27”. The print has an edition of 9 for this image size.
The print was made, and framed by, by Digital Arts Studio in Atlanta who I have been using to produce all my large print editions. Owner Barry Glustoff is fantastic to work with and his lab is one of the top certified printers of Canson and Hahnemȕhle papers in the world.
I would also like to showcase four other photographs in the exhibition which stood out to me:
