Sunlight to Silver:
The Ionic History of Sinaloa

Words by Ryan Steven Green

My parents' home of 36 years–my childhood home–was destroyed in the Eaton Fire of January 2025. As a way to process the grief, but also as an attempt to preserve the house itself, I collected charred wood from the property. Drawing on the expertise of the sustainable photography community, I used the wood to prepare a photographic developer with which I processed the last film images ever to be taken of the house.

Ryan EALL All Stars

For the longest time I sucked at baseball. It was infuriating, but Dad wouldn’t let me quit. Instead, he built a full-size batting cage complete with a pitching mound in our backyard, the regular use of which improved my skills to the point that at twelve years old I made the East Altadena Little League All Star Team as a pitcher, my first such honor. The year was 1993. The Green family was by that point settled into our ranch style home on Sinaloa Ave, having relocated from the 800 sqft starter home in Eagle Rock five years prior. My parents, Glen and Lynn Green, purchased Sinaloa from its original owners who had lived there since its construction in 1948. One of the first upgrades Mom and Dad made was replacing the original wood-shake roof with asphalt shingles, as was newly required under California fire code.

Family Thanksgiving 2005

By 2005, Thanksgiving dinner at Sinaloa was a well established Green family tradition. A multi-family affair, invited families would contribute the side dishes–such as Aunt Cathy's famous creamed corn, or Great Aunt Claire’s ambrosia salad. Dad was responsible for carving the bird.

At the point this photo was taken, I was still a relatively recent USC film school grad and had just returned from a prolonged sojourn in Europe. Planning to document attendees with a series of B&W family portraits, I had brought along my cherished Minolta X-700 35mm camera for that purpose. Arranging my own family members then framing up and focusing, I handed my camera to Aunt Toni, showing her where to stand. Then, taking up the cow skull, I posed beneath the eaves of the front porch with Mom, Dad, and my younger sisters Kimberlee and Sarah. 

At the moment the shutter was actuated, the wood of those overhead eaves was older than either of my parents and had undergone natural changes in its chemical composition. A drop in moisture had caused the wood fibres to shrink, hardening the beams, while exposure to the elements had rendered the surface texture rougher and less resistant to ignition than when freshly cut in the mid-1940s.

Just Married

I was married in the backyard at Sinaloa on a scorchingly hot afternoon in August 2007. Mom and Dad have ever kept an impeccable home, even through the thickest of child-rearing years. But the marriage of their firstborn and only son took this practice to new heights. They worked on the property, both inside and out, for months in preparation for the day of the event. Neither the house nor the yard had ever looked better. Ditto my bride, Jessica. For her, Sinaloa represented the opportunity to begin our new life in a place we anticipated spending many future holidays and family gatherings, and indeed that came to be. In later years my two sisters were married in the same backyard. All of this happened many years before the fire.

Engulfed

The Sinaloa home was located 1.4 miles from the origin of the Eaton Fire. Having been through the Kinneloa Fire of 1993, my parents, 36-year residents of Sinaloa, quickly packed bags and evacuated within three hours of the fire’s ignition on January 7, 2025. In less than 12 hours, the house was gone.

I learned of the destruction of Sinaloa while evacuating my own family of five from our Highland Park home the morning of January 8, 2025. The news came via phone call from Dad who was at that moment standing at the still-smuldering property. Months would pass before I learned that a family member, Lisa Simikic, was in possession of a video clip of Sinaloa fully engulfed in flames. It would be even more months before my resistance gave way and I finally seared my eyeballs watching Lisa’s video clip.

Ryan with Rolleiflex, Photographed by Dave

For my first visit to Sinaloa after its destruction I brought along two close friends. Also with me was my 1960 Rolleiflex 3.5F medium format camera. I had hoped to meticulously document the site on B&W film, but the experience proved too overwhelming and I left having completed just one roll, 12 exposures. However I did fill a large trashbag with charred wood from the home, primarily sourced from the front porch area where some of the larger beams from the eaves were partially intact. I remember describing my mental state as elated. Later on I was surprised to receive a number of video clips of myself that day, captured by my friend Dave. Upon viewing them I thought I looked absolutely out of my mind.

Under natural circumstances, the lignan in wood is the last thing to decay. But when heated to the point of combustion, the natural aging process of wood–its slow oxidation and eventual decomposition–is replaced with a rapid tearing apart of its molecular structure. Under these circumstances, the lignan empties itself of its phenolic compounds in the form of smoke as the remaining carbon backbone is converted into charcoal.

Making wood ash developer

I’m old enough to have learned photography at a time when “photography” and “film” were synonymous. Having gained basic darkroom technique in high school, as an undergrad at USC I was hired as a photographer for the Daily Trojan newspaper. I never pursued photography professionally, though imagemaking remains central to my practice as a documentary filmmaker. The onset of the pandemic finally realized a twenty-year goal to build my own home darkroom, and I’m happy to report that I’ve spent late nights under the safe lights on a fairly regular basis ever since.

Since 2020 I’ve been home-developing my B&W film, but in early 2024 I discovered the possibility of using botanicals in place of the toxic industrial chemicals in common use since the early 20th century. I acquired the book Back to Basics, Volume 1 published by @sustainabledarkroom and in its pages learned that the chemical compound found in botanicals that facilitates converting silver halides into metallic silver (the process we commonly refer to as film development) is called phenolic acid, or phenols for short–the same compounds that are found in the lignan of wood.

For this, my first experiment in eco-friendly film development, I consulted Andrés Pardo of @curiosolab to assist in translating his own botanical recipes from Back to Basics to charred wood. I learned that because the charred wood had been stripped of its phenolic compounds, it would first be necessary to chop it up into the smallest bits possible in order to maximize extraction from any trace phenols that might possibly still be present. But when I began chopping apart the charred eaves from Sinaloa, to my surprise a core of unspoiled, 80-year-old wood was revealed inside the blackened outer crust. This turned out to be a boost for the developer as well, as even very aged wood contains nearly all of its phenolic acid. I was to cram as much of the char as well as whatever slivers of unspoilt wood would fit into a vessel large enough to hold it all. The wood was then to be submerged in a dilution of 2 parts ethanol to 8 parts boiling water and allowed to do its work of extraction for a full seven days. Any evaporation should be topped off with more boiling water.

The instant I removed the processed film from the tank, I could see that the charred wood developer worked as advertised: the two rolls of 120 film demonstrating proper density and crisp contrast on top of perfectly exposed negatives. In short, the homebrew worked just as well as any of the commercially available developers I’d used over the years.

When I shared the happy news with the experts, I was also anxious to learn if, or in what form the home itself was still present in the physical substance of the film. I put the question to Andrés Pardo who responded by citing the first law of thermodynamics: “Nothing that moves through matter is ever lost, only transformed. The house, long after combustion, no longer persists as matter, but as transformation itself, its energetic history diffused into the process.” 

From sun to tree, from tree to char, from char to developer–that energy from the developer is then transferred to the film itself, from phenolic compounds to exposed silver, rendering the image visible. Andrés continued, “What persists is not the house as substance, but its ionic history, a residue without form that continues to act, modulating the conditions under which the image appears and becomes fixed.”

These B&W images of Sinaloa were captured on two separate occasions: February 27, 2025, the day of my first visit to the property following the Eaton Fire; and March 18, 2025, the day the Army Corps of Engineers hauled the carcass away. Both rolls were taken on my 1960 Rolleiflex 3.5F and developed in an extraction created with the charred wood from the house itself. Roll 1 is Kodak Tri-X, and Roll 2 is Arista EDU Ultra 100.

Sinaloa, the original, is long since hauled away. Sinaloa, the rebuild, is currently under construction. What charred wood I didn’t use for the film developer sits in my driveway in the exact spot I left it on February 27, 2025. The black Hefty bag that used to envelop the wood like a body bag has become so degraded that its brittle plastic flakes away at the slightest breeze. Recent rains have filtered through the exposed charcoal, staining the bricks and stucco retaining wall beneath the unsightly black heap. I’m sure the neighbors have noticed, though they’ve had the decency not to mention it.

Having evacuated, having broken the news to my young children, having visited the property, having done the photography project, having journaled and spoken to my therapist, having spent seven months in making a thirteen-minute documentary on the destruction of the Green family home, having now written this article–I don’t know what else to let go of when it comes to Sinaloa, but I know I haven’t let go of its remnants. Perhaps foolishly I believed the active season of grief was behind me, but that is manifestly not the case as I struggle to see the screen typing up these concluding words. From 12-year-old All Star to college graduate: newly-wed to dad of three: fire victim to experimental darkroom chemist–for Ryan Steven Green the family archivist, the evolution continues.

The charred remains will decompose–indeed, the process is well underway. Perhaps a proper burial in the backyard, maybe with some roses to mark the spot, I haven’t decided. And even if the home itself is not a material part of the film substance, the images that a destroyed-Sinaloa helped facilitate will remain forever, fixed in silver, a final resting place for the memory of a childhood home.

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