Photographer Gideon Mendel arrived in L.A. in mid-February, two weeks after the fires were fully contained. Demolition had barely begun; blackened husks of buildings lined the streets. Based in London, Mendel has spent years traveling to sites of climate-related disasters, photographing the victims of devastating floods and fires around the world. Over the course of five weeks in L.A., he captured 129 portraits, meeting the displaced in the charred remains of their houses, businesses, and places of worship. Some gave him objects from the ruins, to be photographed in the studio. And in both the Palisades, a zip code to Hollywood stars and moguls, and Altadena, a diverse middle-class community and an enclave for African Americans since the 1960s, Mendel captured an all-too-modern form of uneasy mourning—one he has encountered in flood-ravaged communities from Nigeria to Brazil to Pakistan and in fire-scorched towns from Australia to Canada to Greece. (What the images of Los Angeles's fires don’t show.)