The faces tell the story
There’s more to the fire story than the flames.
In the years I have been doing this, and there have been many, the actual fire incidents themselves get blurred in my memory. Conversations around the crew table at the station will find their way to particular events from the past as someone offers. “Remember Antil’s in 2006? Now that was a fire”, only to be countered by a wily veteran who’s interpretation of a ‘real fire’ is slightly different. “You weren’t around for the Oxford Pub fire, or the ‘neck’ fire last June when that mansion burned down to nothing.” My memory hones in on them as the conversation points to one in particular, but I’m a photographer, not a firefighter, and my memories are not the same. Not that I’m unfamiliar with the task, as I was a firefighter in the Marine Corps. Not the usual city or town firefighter as are the most familiar, but rather an aircraft crash rescue firefighter whose role was Marine Corps airbase aircraft fires. We had a base fire department (civilian) who handled the base housing firefighting duties. We put out aircraft fires. The the end result is the same: Saving life and property. We just had different methods of achieving the goal. But what I do now is not just capture the incident for the record and for later investigations to sort out the who, what and why, although that is a large part of the equation. Now, once I have gone through the basic steps of capturing the event, I can concentrate on capturing the human element with the people involved in containing it and how they go about it.
Each one is different. Flames are flames and houses are houses, but they never burn the same way. Homes with vinyl siding burn differently than homes made of brick or built with shingles. Roof material, insultion type, flooring materials, walls, windows all contribute to how a fire starts, burns and spreads. The one constant is the people who arrive to put it out. They are firefighters and the very fact they have chosen a profession that finds them running into structures most people are running away from tells you something about who they are. It’s the same kind of bravery that finds police officers running toward gunfire. I run toward the flames as well, but only to capture images of those I work with as they go about performing their mission with this detached mindset where the fire is an entity of its own that must be dealt with and defeated with calculated precision. Contain it to a room; contain it to a floor; contain it to the structure. Don’t let it spread. Don’t let it reach out and let the flames find purchase on a neighboring structure. That’s what they do. This is what I do while they’re doing it.
There really isn’t any formula for getting what I get. The eye is constantly wandering as the fire scene is a chaotic and fast-moving place. Between the flames and the smoke and the action and the hoses and the spraying water and the constant need to have my head on a swivel to make sure ladders don’t fall or I don’t get swept out by hoses being pulled into position or getting knocked down by firefighters running in my direction. It’s happened. Pretty often, actually. I don’t wear fire protective gear. It’s too cumbersome and I need freedom of movement to get to places I need to be. The downside is I inhale more smoke because I’m as close to it as they are, but they are breathing air through a full face mask coming from a tank on their backs. I can’t see through the camera viewfinder with that on. So I cough and sputter and my clothes smell bad when it’s over, but not only have I documented the incident, I have, hopefully, captured the human essence as well.
The photos serve no real function in relation to the event itself, but a good photo editor will see the intrinct value in the human nature side of the story so they are always included when the PIO sends the release to the local media. Many of them end up as bragging rights on the firefighter’s Facebook pages or their Twitter accounts as a ‘Ha! He got me and he didn’t get you!’ kind of friendly taunt among their peers. Although they know full well, next time they may be ones not getting in the shot. It’s a crap shoot, because I never know when I’m going to be in the vicinity when someone is doing something that catches my eye. I may be on the wrong side of the house and miss the Pulitzer Prize winning photo unfolding. That’s happened to me before. Another photographer, not associated with any organization, got a shot of a firefighter comforting a resident and blew me away in the media. Everybody published it front page above the fold. My stuff was relegated to page 3. The photographer’s fantasy and nightmare are two sides of the same coin: The fantasy? Be the only one who gets it. The nightmare? Be the only one who doesn’t. Fortunately, I don’t miss much, and although I have walked around the corner to find a gaggle of photographers all shooting the same thing, I usually come out all right.
What I find the most interesting is what I see in the faces. There is a determination one doesn’t find in other jobs or professions. You see it in the eyes of military personnel and police officers and first responders, but rarely in others, because the ‘others’ don’t usually find themselves dealing with life and death situations on a daily basis. One of the most intense scenes is watching firefighters rescue someone from a burning building. You don’t get that every day, and you don’t have the opportunity to put an event like that in front of your lens. It’s rare, but it happens.
And in this instance, the focus was on the people doing the rescuing and not necessarily the victim. This victim survived. Another did not. And that affects everyone differently as well. No firefighter wants to lose a victim to a fire, and they wear their emotions on their sleeve when they do.
I’m there, not to intrude on their grief, but to show the humanity of the people involved. We/they are not robots doing a job. They take it seriously and rejoice like school kids when they beat flames and save the structure, but grieve along with the home owners when they lose….. especially if they lose someone to the fire. They finish their shift and go back to their own homes and families and hug their kids and their wives and husbands and say a prayer of thanks that it wasn’t their family and add a moment of sorrow as they remember whose home and family it was. At some future point, that fire might be the one brought up by yet another wily veteran describing what a ‘real fire’ is.
