Photo Gallery Saturday is a monthly photo series by the Long Beach Post staff that aims to highlight unique scenes across the city. To contact us, email Visuals Editor Thomas R. Cordova at [email protected]. These photos are not Photoshopped.
Fire changes everything.
Along with earth, water and air, it’s one of the four classic elements and, like the others, it can help you or it can hurt you.
Fire is mesmerizing, mysterious. It’s alluring, comforting, deadly, ferocious. Since it was first harnessed by man (such as man was) a million years ago, fire has provided warmth and sustenance. It was used for cooking, for crafting tools and pottery and over the ensuing thousands of years it’s led to all manner of advancements in technology, manufacturing and touching our lives in thousands of ways.
At the same time it’s been a huge destructive force in destroying forests and buildings, causing unfathomable damage through war, arson, accidents and other forms of mayhem. Fire is, in short, is both essential and terrifying. We need it desperately, and we fear it mightily.
The Post’s photographers studied fire in its latest collection of visual work, from Cheantay Jensen’s photos of fire at a dentist’s office to Crystal Niebla’s pictures of candlelight vigils.