Help Jeff Rebuild After Devastating LA Fires

Photographer, good neighbor and all-around nice guy Jeff Kocher has seen his entire life go up in flames due to the Greater Los Angeles fires. Please consider donating what you can to help him take the next steps toward safety, shelter, and to cover his basic needs.

Right now Jeff is crashing on a friend’s couch. He has two changes of clothes and a few toiletries, his important documents, and that’s it.

Jeff's home before the fires. He had orange trees, lemon trees, and a hammock that is renowned by Icelanders.

Jeff's home now. His whole neighborhood looks like this.

His immediate needs are financial resources to meet his basic needs and take the next steps to search for a place to call home, and once he has a place to live, he’ll need a mattress, a sleeping bag, maybe a dresser, and all of the household items we tend to take for granted. Eventually he would like to rebuild his collections of cameras, art books, coins and DVDs, and get back on track to start exhibiting his art.

Though he could easily teach photography, he had just signed up for a photography class in order to access the darkroom equipment. He went to his first class on Monday.

“Monday night, the winds started coming. Tuesday I couldn’t go to class because a tree fell in front of my car and then Tuesday night we evacuated and Wednesday it’s like… no more. So I dropped the class. I don’t have any cameras, I don’t have any equipment. I can’t replace the collection I had. Some of these things were in mint condition, or I had restored them. They don’t make these cameras any more.”

“I had rare art books, signed ones. And a coin collection. I went back to look and see if anything made it through the fire, but cars were melting on the streets. There’s nothing left. ”

Jeff has a deep love for Altadena and his neighborhood. “Altadena was a working-class community, with artists, actors, singers, genius engineers. Every race and creed, and it’s all gone. It’s lost. It’ll never be the same.”

“No one had a clue that this would happen. We had been through this before. We all just grabbed what we needed for an overnight and thought we would be coming back home the next day. We had no idea the fires would jump from 5,000 feet up to down below where all the houses are. There are literally thousands of people in the same frame of mind. Who would ever believe that 80% of your town would be gone the next day? My bank, my post office, my grocery store, it’s all gone.”

“At first, you don’t believe it’s happening. You’re having an out-of-body experience like this is just a bad dream. I’m going to go to sleep and wake up. And then when that doesn’t happen, you’re in denial, like I lost my house and I’ll just find something else and replace some stuff and it’ll all get back to normal.”

“Then you start thinking about community, your neighbors, your routine, and then it starts to really come to you that, yeah, things aren’t going to be the same. And then when you start talking to the other people and listening to the other people’s stories, then it just hits you. And then after it hits you, when you have to tell your story to friends and family it becomes a reality. When you start giving your testimonials to other people and then it’s like okay, now I’m in the real world and it’s really bad. I was talking to my parents and I just lost it, I said I have to call you back. I was a wreck. At that moment it just hit me.”

“There are a lot more people that lost a lot more than me and I feel very very very fortunate, but I’ve come to the realization that I can’t do this all on my own and I need a little bit of help. So that’s where I am.”

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This GoFundMe is organized by Kate Austin-Avon, a friend of Jeff's from Glens Falls, New York, where he once rented a photography studio in the same building where she had an office. Learn more about who Kate is by viewing her business bio here.