Cover story

‘California Elegance’ profiles the people and places who make the state golden.

In the five years writer Christine Suppes and photographer Frederic Aranda spent compiling their new book, “California Elegance: Portraits From the Final Frontier,” they traveled thousands of miles throughout the state, meeting subjects and scouting locations from San Ysidro along the Mexico border to Yreka near Oregon. While the project began in the collaborators’ minds as a “love letter to the Golden State,” featuring fascinating people and memorable locations, it was always one they knew would be complicated. A particular trip in November 2017 crystallized for them how some of the challenges of the present were dramatically changing life for Northern Californians.

That year, the region was besieged by destructive wildfires. As Suppes and Aranda drove from her home in Palo Alto to Humboldt County for a photo shoot in the Rockefeller Forest, they stopped at a restaurant in Santa Rosa, which had been particularly hard hit.

“I wanted to go to businesses that had been closed during the fire; I knew they must be hurting,”

“California Elegance: Portraits From the Final Frontier”

By Christine Suppes and Frederic Aranda.

(Mondadori, 432 pages, $80)

Tony Bravo in conversation with “California Elegance” author Christine Suppes and photographer Frederic Aranda: 6 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 18. Free. https://tickets.sf chronicle.com/e/sfc-california -elegance says Suppes, who is also the author with Aranda of the 2015 photographic memoir “Electric Fashion.” What Suppes and Aranda found in Santa Rosa was resilience.

“This was only a couple weeks after the fires, but there were a lot of people there who obviously felt the way I did about it being important to patronize places that had lost business,” Suppes says. “You had this sense they were coming together for each other. They talked about it. It said something to me about who lives here. They were grateful.”

Suppes and Aranda came to feel that they were documenting a state that had reached a peak interest in the popular consciousness. It was also a time when the people here were dealing with drought, climate change, housing shortages and economic disparities like never before. The book would remain a love letter, but one that acknowledged those realities and the people working to change them.

“If you’re going to come into an experience like putting a book

Frederic Aranda

Mondadori