HELP TURN ALTADENA’S STORIES INTO A BOOK

My name is Sunny Mills. I am an Altadena resident who lost my home and art studio in the Eaton Fire in January 2025.

Six weeks after the fire, I returned to the ashes of my home with a donated camera and a darkroom built into the back of my car. I made a self-portrait there. Seeing myself in that image was powerful. It memorialized my loss, but it also witnessed my survival.

I shared that experience with the Beautiful Altadena community and offered to make portraits for anyone who wanted to be photographed where their home once stood. I expected a few responses. Instead, I heard from hundreds.

From March through July, I returned to Altadena almost every day. Navigating dump trucks, water trucks, and widespread destruction, I made nearly 400 tintype portraits in the burn zone and listened to hundreds of stories of loss, grief, endurance, and hope.

Each tintype was made by hand, one at a time, using the slow wetplate process. Every image was exposed, developed, and fixed on site in the back of my car. The slowness mattered. It created space for people to be seen, heard, and witnessed. These moments became acts of shared presence and, for many of us, a form of healing.

This project has always been about the community.

I now want to turn this work into a book.

This book will be a collective Altadena memorial. It will be a permanent record of what we lived through together and a reminder that even after immense loss, we remain a community and we will rebuild for that community.

Disasters often reduce places to headlines and statistics. This book refuses that flattening. These portraits hold dignity, resilience, and humanity. They deserve to live beyond social media, beyond news cycles, and beyond the moment when attention moves on.

The book will be an intimate 8 × 10 inch volume, approximately 120 pages, pairing portraits with fragments of testimony, silence, and space. It will be quiet, deliberate, and lasting.

I am working with fellow Altadena resident Nicholas Fahey of the Fahey/Klein Gallery, and the foreword is being written by Jim Ganz, Curator of Photography at the Getty Museum. Together, we are committed to honoring this work with care and seriousness.

FUNDING GOAL

I am raising $35,000 to produce the first edition of the book.

Your support will go directly toward:

TIMELINE

Book production will begin in Spring 2026, with publication planned for Summer 2026.

A NOTE TO SUPPORTERS

I cannot complete this project alone. Support from the Altadena community and those who believe in preserving shared memory will ensure this work is held with the care it deserves.

By contributing or sharing this campaign, you are helping safeguard a visual and oral record of Altadena at a defining moment in its history. Your support transforms grief into something held, honored, and remembered.

Thank you for being part of this.

Sunny

P.S. I am starting a mailing list to keep donors updated on the progress. Please be sure to include your contact email in your GFM reply.

No raffles, sweepstakes, giveaways, or returns on investment are offered in exchange for any donations made to this GoFundMe.