Josh Edelson
Josh Edelson is a San Francisco–based photojournalist and corporate photographer known for documenting California’s wildfire crisis for more than a decade. His coverage for Agence France-Presse has appeared worldwide, including in The New York Times, TIME, and The Washington Post. Edelson’s long-term wildfire project was recently exhibited at Visa Pour L’Image, and he is the 2025 winner of the Canon Varenne Grand Prix Photo. He also works with leading corporate clients such as Google, Meta, Salesforce, and Stanford.
Josh Edelson is an award-winning San Francisco–based photojournalist and commercial photographer whose work focuses on wildfire, climate, and natural disaster coverage across California and the American West. For more than a decade, he has documented over one hundred wildfires for Agence France-Presse, creating one of the most extensive and enduring visual records of the region’s escalating fire crisis. His photographs—including multiple covers and front-page images—have appeared in The New York Times, TIME Magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and news outlets worldwide.
In addition to wildfires, Edelson specializes in covering natural disasters more broadly, including floods, volcanic eruptions, tornadoes, droughts, and other extreme weather events. His reporting places him at the center of rapidly unfolding emergencies, where he documents both the environmental destruction and the human experience of communities in crisis.
In 2025, Edelson’s long-term wildfire project was exhibited at Visa Pour L’Image in Perpignan, France, and he was awarded the Canon Varenne Grand Prix Photo for his continued coverage of climate-driven catastrophe. Alongside his editorial work, he photographs corporate events, headshots, and large-scale commercial assignments for clients such as Google, Meta, Salesforce, Amazon, and Stanford, and provides coaching and mentorship to emerging photographers.
A family races down a smoke-choked road as their world burns behind them. A nurse evacuates patients through ash-filled air. A mother returns to where her home stood only hours earlier, staring at a foundation still too hot to touch. These are the moments that now define summers in the American West.
Over the past decade, California has endured some of the deadliest fires in its history. The Camp Fire killed 85 people and erased 18,800 structures. The Dixie Fire tore through almost 1 million acres, turning entire towns into ash and splintered memory. The 2025 Los Angeles fires displaced tens of thousands overnight, leaving the entire region unrecognizable.
It is not just the scale—it is the speed. Fires that once crept now sprint. Flames leap highways, rivers, six-lane divides. Winds turn sparks into firestorms within minutes. Ordinary people—teachers, retirees, farmworkers—find themselves outrunning walls of heat that behave less like weather and more like living things.
Josh Edelson has stood in these moments when the sky turns a deep orange and time compresses into adrenaline and instinct. His photographs bear witness to what fire takes, what it reveals, and what remains when dawn finally breaks over the ash.
* Visa pour l’Image, Perpignan (2025) – California: A Decade in the Heart of the Blaze exhibited at the world’s leading photojournalism festival.
* Fondation Varenne Grand Prix Photo Exhibition, Paris (2025) – Featured work as winner of the Grand Prix Photo.
* Facing Fire: Art, Wildfire & the End of Nature in the New West, UCR Arts, Riverside (2020) – Wildfire coverage included in this landmark group exhibition examining the rise of megafires in the American West.
* AFP & AP Curated Retrospectives (Multiple Years) – Wildfire and climate-related images featured in newswire exhibitions and year-in-pictures showcases.