This series was photographed using 4x5 large-format black-and-white film. Through this methodical and contemplative process, I sought to slow down time—to hold a moment of stillness within a landscape of loss. The images center on what endures after devastation: chimneys and fireplaces that remain standing amidst the ruins.

Historically, the chimney is one of humanity’s earliest architectural responses to fire. It represents warmth, protection, and home. Fireplaces are where people gathered, where life unfolded. But in this context, the fireplace becomes a paradox. The very element that once made human life more livable—fire—has turned destructive. It has erased the structures meant to contain it, yet left behind the symbolic core: the chimney.

These upright forms now read like monuments—stoic, skeletal, and strangely dignified. They are fire’s witnesses, bearing silent testimony to loss, resilience, and the fragile line between shelter and vulnerability.

Though no figures appear in these photographs, the human trace is everywhere: in the charred floorplans, the melted window frames, the remnants of walls that once protected. Ash Still Falls is not only about destruction—it is about what remains. These images ask how we carry memory through ruins, and how structures outlive the lives they once served.

As ash continues to fall and time slowly carries forward, these fireplaces remain. They are not only relics of loss, but symbols of endurance—fragments of home that fire could not consume.