Everyone loves a fire...?

December 15, 2020 2:19 PM

Several local fire departments around here (Boston area) seem to have professional photographers (or at least relatively competent amateurs in the department) who take photos of incident responses, new hardware, and general "slice of life" stuff and put them on Twitter using the official FD account. Is there any history behind this? Is it widespread?

I'm mostly curious if there's a known history of fire departments employing photographers to document their work, and if so whether anyone's archived these. Is this a common thing for fire departments to do? Who's the target audience? If you have any firsthand insight into this practice, I would be very interested to hear about it

posted by backseatpilot to Grab Bag (8 answers total)

Tweet at them and ask! Whether they're amateurs or professionals, I bet they'd be happy that someone noticed their work enough to ask, so you're likely to get a response from at least one or two places.

There is a (brief) Wikipedia page on fire photography that suggests non-PR reasons for staff photographers to exist in fire departments, such as documenting fires or the aftermath of fires for later investigation, preparing training materials, etc. That page says large fire departments "such as New York City and Chicago" have these staff positions - maybe Boston does too.
posted by showbiz_liz at 2:41 PM on December 15, 2020 [2 favorites]

Often these employees are titled as public information officers. Here's one in Boston.
posted by JackBurden at 3:35 PM on December 15, 2020

I grew up in a firefighting family (Indianapolis) and can attest that the department had staff photographers at least as far back as the 1930s. There are tons of department photos from before that time, but I don’t know if they were on staff.

Most of the pics I ever saw were documenting various incidents/fires (often gruesomely so) and many pics of apparatus and firefighters. I recently ran across a candid pic of my dad working a fire on a website associated with the IFD fire museum. He was so young!

I suspect a lot of what the photographers did was documentation for investigations into possible arson.
posted by Thorzdad at 3:42 PM on December 15, 2020 [1 favorite]

There was an excellent BBC documentary about the Notre Dame fire recently, and I was surprised to see that as well as photographers the Parisian firefighters had a dedicated sketch artist.
posted by Fuchsoid at 5:13 PM on December 15, 2020 [2 favorites]

My husband is a volunteer firefighter and they have photos for as long as his department’s been around—not paid professional, but good quality. Arson investigation as Thorzdad mentions, training, and frankly because people who are firefighters like pictures of themselves looking cool. And it’s helpful to show pictures of people doing helpful, scary-looking things for free when they are asking the town for a new truck. Also, fires are news. Sometimes the amateur pictures make the paper because the house burned down at 2am during a snowstorm (note: houses always burn down at 2am during a snowstorm. Or on Mother’s Day.)

When doing genealogy, I found a picture from about 1895, only because that relation was a firefighter, so I think it’s been a thing for a long time. I don’t know if most departments properly archive these materials. At our home department the pictures I know about are framed on the walls, and the newer ones rotate regularly.
posted by tchemgrrl at 5:22 PM on December 15, 2020 [2 favorites]

This is clearly anecdata, but I know someone who was a photojournalist that then became a firefighter. I don't know if he still takes photos for his unit, but I also assume this experience is not ... uncommon.

(In his case, he formed a close relationship with the firefighters he was covering on scene & the became interested in what they did and decided to join them.)

I think there's really no downside to having a good photographer on your team. And also, with digital photography, it's not too hard to get a good shot of something.
posted by edencosmic at 5:50 PM on December 15, 2020

Two sons who are volunteer firefighters. Some of the best pictures I have of them are in full gear.

Check out Insta account Kempter's Fire Wire. https://instagram.com/kemptersfirewire?igshid=1qkomu47wiqka

Says they are a member of the Connecticut firefighter photography association.
posted by AugustWest at 6:37 PM on December 15, 2020

So you have departmental photographers (sometimes), you have folks working in conjunction with the PIOs, you have your investigators...and you have your fire buffs.

Fire buffs are folks who have a keep interest in the fire service as a hobby. They visit the stations and listen to the scanner and show up on scene. The most notable name in this region is Mike Legeros. He’s been following Raleigh around forever and is kind of an unofficial historian.

Yes these people exist. Sometimes they have good relationships with the departments and the people, sometimes it veers into the political.

Another factor to take away from this is that photographs of an emergency scene CAN be subpoenaed, especially if a crime has occurred. Therefore, I never take pictures on scene with my personal phone and I encourage my subordinates to exercise the same cautions lest they want their phone snatched for a case.

Firemen looooove getting their pictures taken. Especially with their rigs or tools.
posted by sara is disenchanted at 11:55 AM on December 16, 2020