A collection of missing collections

There's two parts to what I'm bringing today. The objects you're probably handling right now are a collection of images I captured of my neighborhood this past summer, which the majority of burned down in the Eaton fire in January of 2025. I think this collection of images does a good job of representing the quantity of loss that my community experienced as well as the level of destruction that these homes have been reduced to. The other thing these objects present to the viewer is a way to get hands on with a disaster that's foreign to them: these images were captured from the spot they captured, and have not been altered. What you're holding was in a natural disaster zone.

A collection of some of the instant images 

 

The other side of this is the container that I've carried these in for the past 8 months. This container contained some items that I purchased for myself the Christmas before the fires as an early Christmas gift, and I really hadn't spent much time thinking about that until the start of this course. It's funny to me to imagine this collection that so deeply shows that objects are not all there is being contained in the most obvious example of consumerism and needless spending and collecting.  

The chariot in which these images have been carried

 

An image of the images stuffed inside their home

I think that devoid of this context, the images may stand on their own and the meaning of the box may get lost on people, however I think that may be coming from the fact that this was the exact experience I had. I'm hoping that the images do a good job of being physical representations of scale. I think the images being relatively unremarkable forces the viewer into seeing it as a collection rather than a series, which feeds into that hopeful narrative. But the box itself may be lost on people as it was on me.