In recent years, there’s been a noticeable uptick in stories about California prisoner-firefighters–features by Bloomberg Businessweek, The Guardian, The Marshall Project and New York Times Magazine among others. Besides a dramatic increase in the number of fires, the uptick can be attributed to the convergence of factors–prison administrators providing journalists with broader access, editors responding to increased public interest in criminal justice (reform), and photographers sating their own curiosity.

For the most part, the photographs in these features reset common assumptions about incarcerated people and reveal elements of this lesser-known strand of modern-day servitude. Absent bars, cells, and razor wire, it’s not immediately obvious that these images depict prisoners. In boots, overalls, and gloves, men and women traipse along hillsides and forested trails. They carry picks, chainsaws, and hose lines. They move through dust, smoke, and shafts of golden-hour light. They are cast as heroes. Make no mistake: for the lands they save and the risks they take, they are heroes.

In one respect, the photographs can be read as redemption in action; prisoners doggedly pursuing self-worth and making sacrifices for the greater good. A hero narrative is always seductive but it can also mislead or allow for complacency. Might this new breed of representations distract us from the reality of the tortured conditions in which hundreds of thousands of other U.S. prisoners exist? If these prisoners are heroes, they must be empowered, no? If they are represented as dignified and productive, can’t only good come of these images? If they are not under the yoke of constant surveillance, are they not somehow free, or freer, than they were?

Prisoner-firefighters account for 2% of the California state prison population. Might the recent prevalence of photographs of this minority skew our perceptions and distract us from the gross abuses, waste, and failings of the prison industrial complex?

Brian Frank’s documentary work uses a mixture of candid portraits and work scenes, relying heavily on grain and an earthen palette to evoke grime, smell, and haze. By comparison, Peter Bohler’s images are shot under clear ocean blue skies that make the orange uniforms pop. Both Frank and Bohler shot crews damping remains or cutting fire-breaks; no raging fire in either’s portfolio. The muddied faces of Frank’s subjects are reminiscent of Don McCullin’s portraits of soldiers, or Earl Dotter’s images of Appalachian miners. By contrast, Bohler’s magazine-y approach turns the women into pin-ups. One lounges in the dirt beside her chainsaw, peering over cocked tinted sunglasses. Another stands against a pink backdrop of flame retardant–covered brush. It looks like a constructed set.

Bohler’s pristine composition of four women meditating, eyes closed, in the lotus position, sits in stark contrast to the baggy, slouching, slumbering men during downtime in Frank’s photos. Bohler raises up his subjects by affording them editorial photography’s best treatment, lighting, and concern, whereas Frank raises up his subjects by baking in the caked-on dirt and sweat. Both photographers turn their subjects into heroes; they just get there by different means. 

It is understandable that Americans–who live within a racist, economically violent, and traumatic social reality–might seek solace in images of useful, nonviolent, and pro-social correctional conditions. But the truth is that no other nation in the history of humankind has imprisoned more citizens during peacetime. Over the past 40 years, the U.S. prison system has exploded from approximately 400,000 prisoners to 2.2 million. Men, women, and children are sent down for longer sentences under harsher laws that have come to define America’s shameful failed experiment in mass incarceration. Prisons offer scant and irregular access to rehabilitation and education. They disproportionately warehouse people of color. The vast majority of U.S. prisons are overcrowded. While characterized by very occasional spikes in serious violence, more often prisons are sites of boredom and trashed potential. 

Serving time at a fire camp is better than doing time in any of California’s other state prisons. Comparably “the conservation camps are bastions of civility,” wrote Jaime Lowe for the New York Times. “They are less violent and offer more space. They smell of eucalyptus, the ocean, fresh blooms. They provide barbecue areas for families who visit […] They have woodworking areas, softball fields, and libraries full of donated mysteries and romance novels.” 

Bohler’s image of prisoners practicing yoga and Frank’s images of TV and card games speak to this relative freedom. But it is possible to acknowledge the benefits of the fire camp’s relaxed living culture while simultaneously rejecting the wretched economics of the work culture. Mobilized out of 30 CDCR fire camps, 3,700 prisoner-firefighters are paid 32 cents per hour ($2.56 per day) and $1 per hour when they work the fire-lines. They also get 2 days of their time for each day on the job. The number of workers spikes each wildfire season. As our climate crisis advances, drier weather patterns extend, and blazes grow more severe, prison labor will take up more of the fight against fire. CDCR estimates that the fire camp program saves California taxpayers $100 million a year. Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and Wyoming also use prison labor to fight fire, but no state relies on prisoners as much as California. Continuously on call, prisoner-firefighters are a virtually irreplaceable resource in the Golden State. 

Philip Montgomery’s work falls between that of Frank and Bohler. Montgomery captures action among the broken, charred ground but also secures a couple of formal-ish shots of men gazing toward the camera. All of Montgomery’s images are shot at night, and his subjects–rendered either by harsh flash or by digital sensor in muddy lowlight–stare into the dark beyond. If fire is not the prisoners’ backdrop, we know they are on the move, headed toward more flames. Like Bohler, Montgomery channels the fashion-magazine aesthetic, but his on-the-fly portraits always point toward the work the prisoners have completed and the work to which they’ll return. 

Frank’s work is gritty, Montgomery’s is stylized, and Bohler’s is sexy. Tim Hussin’s photographs, which are the most recent, forgo any color theorizing and cast the damaged landscape in wider gray scale drama. If Robert Adams were to photograph fire abatement, it might look something like this. Perhaps Hussin deliberately moved away from the textured chromatic work of those who went before. 

There are a few contradictory ways in which Bohler, Frank, Hussin and Montgomery’s images may function: Firstly, the state, by furnishing press access, pushes a soft propaganda of a purposeful prison system; secondly, activists, by opposing the prison industrial complex, adopt these images for didactic, targeted, anti-state messaging; and thirdly, the public may salve its conscience with easy-to-stomach images and convince itself that prisons aren’t too bad, prisoners get a fair shake, and we needn’t be concerned. But prisons are bad. And we should be concerned. 

My inquiry is cautionary and somewhat speculative. I welcome prisoner-firefighter imagery, but I’d like to see it offset by raw footage of prisons’ tedium, manipulations, assaults and stresses. (Since this writing, there has been a large public debate about the ethics of publishing prison images of extreme violence.) 

Each firefighting prisoner in these photos—through luck, will, coercion or a combination of the three—are seen, if only momentarily, as more than his or her worst mistake. Most prisoners are not afforded the perverse opportunity to work for slave wages in order to rehabilitate their lives and their image. Most prisoners are not seen. Most prisoners do not have the chance to work beyond the panoptic prison space. These prisoners working for pennies on the dollar in the great outdoors are outliers. We must applaud their labor but condemn the apparatus it serves. We must see them as individuals outside both the norm and the prison walls. Going forward, we must demand to see the many individuals inside the walls, too.

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Originally published as ‘Fire Inside’ in Propeller Magazine #3 (The Propaganda Issue) put out by Helice in Lisbon, Portugal Thanks to editor Sofia Silva and to photographers Peter Bohler, Brian Frank and Tim Hussin.