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A project that Peter Knudsen ’62 began as an assignment for a documentary photography class led to the publication of Silent Glory-Images of a Fire/EMS Department. He began photographing Texas firefighters in June 2001 as a homework assignment.
For seven months Knudsen was accepted into the world of a local fire and emergency squad. He rode along to “big time structure fires” and shared meals back at the station, recording in more than 7,000 photographs the details of life in a community fire department. He was honored as “Fire Citizen of the Year” and appointed “Honorary Deputy Fire Chief.” Finally Knudsen selected his best photographs to self-publish in a coffee-table book that arrived in bookstores in October.
“My project was well underway when 9-11 happened,” says Knudsen, who acknowledges that similar editions honoring firefighters were published quickly in the aftermath of the 9-11 tragedies. “The reality of my work is not to eulogize the towering infernos of New York, rather the local community departments who just as selflessly with the same dangers, quietly go about their work on our behalf at the grassroots level with hardly our notice.”
Knudsen, an economics and business graduate with an M.B.A. from Drexel University who lives in Weston, Texas, has taken up photography and other projects in his retirement.