When the Los Angeles wildfires broke out in January, I was back where I grew up, visiting my mother, who lives a few miles from where the first blazes erupted in Pacific Palisades.

Among my tasks was poring through the life’s work of my father, Morton Witz, an advertising photographer who had died a little over a decade earlier. My sister, Diane, and I had been putting this off for years, knowing it would be a monumental, and emotional, undertaking.

There were photos from jobs. Photos from vacations. Photos of Diane and me, going back almost to the moment we had been born.

As I began to dig through file boxes with my wife, I came across a collection of about 200 slides, in plastic sleeves, that had no connection with one another. They may have been the images he liked best. A shot of a Paris Metro platform, with passengers and a train in motion, in 1970. One of Diane and me, backlit by the sun, trying to catch fish along the Hay River in Canada’s Northwest Territories.

Then there was a photo from an N.F.L. game.

My father had done a handful of jobs over the years for N.F.L. Properties, the league’s merchandising subsidiary. In the image I discovered, the camera was aimed straight down the line of scrimmage. A referee was in the foreground as the Los Angeles Rams, in their crisp home whites, and the Detroit Lions, in their classic silver and blue, dug into the muck awaiting the snap of the ball. It was stamped December 1966.

I pulled out my phone, and snapped a photo.

As the fires spread over the next few days, I stayed in Los Angeles to help the National desk cover the damage.