Photographer Marc Trautmann Documents Iconic Mid-Century Homes Destroyed in LA Wildfires at Frankfurt Gallery Show

CASEY photographer Marc Trautmann’s Ashes of Modernism is a photographic project that documents the aftermath of the January 2025 Los Angeles wildfires, focusing on the destruction of key twentieth‑century Modernist houses. Centered on works by architects including Richard Neutra, Gregory Ain, and Kemper Nomland, the project examines how an architecture built on ideals of clarity, openness, and progress confronted the realities of climate catastrophe. 

The photographs trace the remains of significant homes such as the Freedman, Kesler, and Bridges Houses—structures that once embodied postwar California’s belief in a rational, sunlit future. In their ruins, Modernism appears simultaneously realized and undone, shifting from a symbol of progress to an archaeology of loss. 

Positioned between art and evidence, the work is photographed in medium‑format digital and supported by the Richard Neutra Gesellschaft in Germany. Its restrained visual language—marked by precision, structural clarity, and the absence of color—transforms scenes of destruction into quiet acts of witnessing rather than spectacle. 

Set against the broader scale of the 2025 fires, which destroyed or damaged more than 18,000 structures across the Los Angeles region and displaced over 100,000 people, Ashes of Modernism situates architectural loss within a wider cultural and environmental context. The project reflects on the limits of modernist ideals and asks what remains worth preserving as the symbols of progress themselves turn to ash.