Hollywood is burning: imagery and polycrisis

In early January 2025, wildfires swept through several regions of Los Angeles, California. The fires' proximity to Hollywood, the epicentre of Western visual and cinematic production, lead to the creation and wide circulation of real and artificially generated images on social media. In this article, I argue two things: first, that these images capture human concerns in the age of polycrisis; and second, by interpreting these images as symptoms of an attempt to articulate a sense of reality in which human imagination has itself become under threat, public humanists of the present and future need to be attuned to their role as mediators of diverse publics and their way of making sense under these crisis conditions. This article thus uses selected imagery of Los Angeles's wildfires circulating on social media to excavate how ways of meaning-making in a digital age (memeification, use of generative artificial intelligence) reflect real public concerns about polycrisis, rendering these images productive beyond their satirical or misinforming values.