About This Project

Maxime Riche

From the series “Paradise”. 

On November 8, 2018, the mega-fire Camp Fire ravaged Paradise, California, killing 89 in 4 hours. In 2020, the North Complex Fire burned a few miles away from Paradise and the Dixie Fire consumed 963,000 acres in 2021, starting on the same hills crisscrossed by power lines. 

«I traveled to Paradise in 2020 and 2021 to meet those who have decided to rebuild their “paradise” in a place that now seems brutally inhospitable.
To account for the intensity of emotion heard in my conversations with survivors I use an infrared film, whose blazing colors break into the tenuous normality of their new life. “Flashbacks” of the inferno, serve to recall the memory of the flames seared on their retinae as they rebuild in the shadow of the next disaster.

Navigating between documentary and fiction, the tale of Paradise gives us a glimpse at the next place that will have to go through healing after a disaster whose causes are, increasingly, human. It suggests our ever-greater disconnect from nature.»

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