“For everyone else, it’s over. But not for us:” Documenting the people who rebuilt Paradise

On November 8, 2018, the Camp Fire became the deadliest and most destructive wildfire in California history, claiming 85 lives and nearly erasing the peaceful town of Paradise. Sparked by faulty powerlines and exacerbated by insufficient safety protocols, the close-knit community of 26,000 was shattered overnight by the fire. While most who escaped were too traumatized to return, others set about rebuilding almost immediately, undeterred by subsequent nearby blazes like the North Complex Fire in 2020 and the Dixie Fire in 2021.

In the shadow of constant danger, what do these events say about the relationship between humans and nature? French photographer Maxime Riché’s latest series, Paradise, explores this question through a style he calls “speculative documentary.” Presenting both the material and psychological fallout, Maxime uses the events in Paradise to envision a future for other fire-prone communities striving for an elusive return to normality following such disasters.

Captured in 2020 and 2021, Maxime’s work looks beyond scorched cars and empty lots in the aftermath of the megafire. Previously cyclic and often predictable, wildfires are now considered a year-round threat; a change Maxime suggests comes from “our ever-increasing separation from nature.” This disparity leads us to overlook the hostile realities of rural towns like Paradise, where catastrophe can always strike.

“Many people say they returned because they loved the community they had. But if something like this happens again or if the trend continues, they will have to move somewhere else. People are still on edge,” says Maxime.

“Living in such a place is a romantic ideal inspired by the concept of wildness. But the climate is changing and we can’t control it”

- Maxime Riche

Arriving in Paradise, Maxime found about 2,000 people already rebuilding their lives. However, he soon learned most residents’ home insurance policies wouldn’t cover construction costs, while others still awaited much-needed compensation after Pacific Gas & Electric accepted responsibility for the fire. Searching for a solution, many locals currently live in cars and RVs on the burned-out land where their homes once stood. Insuring newly built homes in Paradise is often prohibitively expensive, with premiums rising by over 1,000 percent since the Camp Fire.

Paradise’s community continues to rebuild despite these uncertainties, displaying admirable resilience. Yet the idea that we can shape the land and climate to our needs now feels increasingly out of place in the Anthropocene age. As one fire specialist described to The Los Angeles Times: “The DNA of these towns is such that they’re … set up for disaster.”

On the day Paradise was destroyed, high winds collapsed the town’s powerlines in the dense nearby hills, igniting built-up, bone-dry vegetation following years of drought. Then, the same extreme winds spread the inferno as flaming embers set the wider community alight.

While the Camp Fire was described as a once-in-a-lifetime event, closer inspection showed the disaster was almost inevitable.

After several near misses in the years preceding the Camp Fire, the town had installed early warning equipment and practiced evacuation drills. Seemingly, it was well prepared. However, according to the Times, Paradise’s roads were repeatedly identified as inadequate for a mass evacuation. Meanwhile, the emergency warning system failed to notify as much as 60 percent of the local population on the day of the fire.

The natural geography surrounding Paradise also dramatically increased the likelihood of severe wildfires. In particular, gale-force winds funneled through the nearby Feather River Canyon, supercharging the blaze to 4,600 acres per hour. The danger of so-called ‘canyon wildfires’ had been rising over the years, but their serious risk wasn’t factored into any of Paradise’s fire safety plans.

“Living in such a place is a romantic ideal inspired by the concept of wildness. But the climate is changing and we can’t control it,” says Maxime, highlighting how his work seeks to understand how we adapt to climate change. “I’m trying to bring an extra layer through photography to make you feel concerned and want to investigate for yourself.”

Besides sensitive portraits of residents, Maxime conveys the eerie atmosphere of fires through infrared film. Reimagining the “visions these people could have lived through.”

To do so, he developed several close relationships with Paradise residents, some of whom he stayed with while he worked. While he was initially hesitant to ask challenging questions, considering the distress people had experienced, he realized that his presence was helping some locals process their trauma and vocalize how they felt let down by the government and its systems.

“When I was there in 2021, it was like a kind of catharsis for people to talk to me about their story,” says Maxime, adding how invisible issues like PTSD plagued local firefighters and residents. “The psychological support had stopped and the housing support was going to stop, so people felt for everyone else it’s over, but not for us.”

Besides sensitive portraits of weary but resolute residents and emergency workers, Maxime conveys the eerie atmosphere of fires through infrared film. Reimagining the “visions these people could have lived through,” these confronting flashbacks feature heightened colors, like smokey yellow skies and crimson red plants alongside deeper and darker blacks. “[The infrared images] are not reality like straight documentary photography,” he says, “but more my view of what an event like that could look like. I like showing a back and forth with the present, the past and a possible future.”

This wasn’t the project’s only creative element. To create certain prints, Maxime transported pinewood ash and resin from Paradise to his Paris studio, where he invented a new process alongside experts at his workshop. Borrowing from 19th-century printing techniques but replacing harmful chemicals with biodegradable alternatives, these resinotypes embed the ash as a fine grain to heighten each print’s materiality.

Maxime also secured some of the last available cibachrome printing paper for his exhibitions. Beloved by photographers for decades for its vibrant and metallic colors, Maxime says four prints using this now-extinct stock symbolize Paradise’s disappearance from the landscape. Finally, he used a 360-degree camera to create a powerful virtual reality experience, where visitors can listen to interviews with locals while visually immersed in the town’s scarred environment.

“This creates a two-way dialogue where you can either stand in front of something from Paradise or you can go to Paradise and hear the voices of the people in the actual environment where they were photographed. I wanted to do that because when I was there, it was shocking how surreal it looked with the orange skies and burnt trees,” explains Maxime.

Following two major Paris exhibitions at the National Library of France and the National Centre for Visual Arts, Maxime plans to publish his Paradise photobook in the coming months and find opportunities to exhibit the work in the United States. Having remained in touch with many of those he photographed, he hopes to “give back a little” to people who shared their troubled lives with him for the project. 

Five years after the Camp Fire, Paradise continues to rebuild. The town has installed new powerlines underground, removed a million trees, unclogged roads and installed a more rigorous warning system. The town’s housing market is also booming, though few homes are being built from non-combustible materials. Plus, the region’s geographic realities remain unavoidable.

“The truth is when you talk about the environment, you mostly talk about people living on the planet and how the environment changes because of our activities. Even though I photograph landscapes and talk about nature, the images also say a lot about us as a society,” says Maxime. “It’s hard to separate the two–we’re very much linked.”

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