Max Reinhart – The Detroit News
Bill Eisner didn’t have any immediate survivors when he died Nov. 7, but hundreds of firefighters considered him a friend. Some had known him for decades and many visited him during his brief stay in the hospital before he passed. He was 87.
He lived in a modest apartment in Roseville, but at any given moment you’d be just as likely to find him at one of the 46 fire houses in Detroit.
He wasn’t religious. “He went to the church of the Detroit Fire Department,” said his friend and associate, Patti Kukula.
Capturing the raw emotion and human drama at the scene of Detroit fires was more than a hobby, more than a livelihood for Eisner. For 62 years, it was his life.
“It didn’t matter if it was the middle of winter, at 3 o’clock in the morning. If there was a fire to photograph, Bill was there,” said Bill Grimshaw, a friend of Eisner’s for 50-plus years.
A Detroit Original
Eisner started taking photos of the Detroit Fire Department’s runs in 1962, but his fascination with fire goes back further, according to Kukula, executive director of the Detroit Public Safety Foundation.
“When he was 8 years old, he lived on Linwood on the west side and there was a fire at a lumber house five or six blocks away,” she said. “He saw it burn and after that he was always in awe” of fire and firefighters.
At age 15, an aunt gave Eisner a Kodak camera, igniting his love affair with photography. He later served as an Army medic in Germany, which Kukula said shaped his knack for capturing the complexities in life-or-death situations.
“He realized, ‘I see this trauma through a different lens,'” Kukula said. “He had the instinct, the perspective to capture the anguish, the dirt, the grit.
“That’s why he came back to Detroit,” where he knew he could find more of that intensity.
Eisner could be expected to show up whenever and wherever a blaze erupted somewhere in the city. As sure as any onlooker would find a firefighter aiming a fire hose, they would just as likely find Eisner, aiming his camera, snapping shot after shot.
“It got to the point that firefighters would move out of his way, rather than him moving out of theirs,” Grimshaw said.
He was so ever-present that it became something of a rite of passage for crew members to receive a photo that Eisner had taken of them. Sometimes he would make collages and give them to the firefighters.
In the late 1980s, when Charles Simms had only been with the DFD for a few years, Eisner got a shot of him emerging from a downtown building after he’d been momentarily trapped inside when a gas meter exploded.
Soon after Simms was appointed fire commissioner in late 2021, Eisner brought him a print of a shot, which now hangs in Simms’ office.
“He had boxes and boxes of photos and he knew where to find them all,” Simms said. “The last number I heard was he had about 175,000 photos of Detroit fires.”
A Friend to Every Firefighter
In return for his unyielding support, Eisner was always cared for by the men and women whose work he so revered.
Fire officials always made sure Eisner had a Fire Department jacket and was allowed close to the action to get his shots, Kukula said. They also provided space where he could store cameras, film and other equipment.
“He could go into any fire station any time of day or night, stay there and have a nice firehouse meal,” Simms said.
Despite his intense passion for highlighting their work, Eisner himself was never a firefighter, at least not officially.
“We consider him a Detroit Fire Department firefighter,” Simms said. “He’s the longest-working member in my eyes.”
His love for the department extended beyond the fires he captured so hauntingly. Kukula said he attended virtually every memorial service whenever a firefighter passed away and went to around 800 retirement parties over the years, always with camera in hand.
“Over the entire 60-some years, he never had a check from the city of Detroit,” Kukula said. In his later years, “he lived on Social Security and what he could sell” to newspapers, magazines, websites or other entities.
His photo of a Detroit firefighter carrying the lifeless body of one of seven children who died in a house fire near the intersection of Mack and Chene was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize after it appeared in a 1993 edition of the Detroit Free Press.
He was nominated and won other awards throughout his career, Grimshaw said.
‘Definitely a Legend’
Eisner’s impact will long be felt in Detroit, especially through the countless photos he took, but also in the many lives he touched, friends say.
Ted Roney got to know Eisner over the past 15 or so years because they share the same passion, shooting fires in Detroit.
“I’ve kind of done what he has done but at nowhere near the level or time he’s spent,” Roney said. “He’s definitely a legend.”
Roney said he admired the way Eisner continued to pursue his passion even into his 80s.
“He didn’t slow down like your typical old man,” he said. “He was still able to get more than just the flames … he was able to get the actual news shot.”
Eisner’s work was published by The Detroit News as recently as 2022.
Kukula said Eisner had been in declining health for a few months when friends discovered him semiconscious in his home earlier this month. He hadn’t answered his phone for two days.
He spent a few days in Henry Ford St. John Hospital, where he was visited by a steady stream of firefighters and other friends until he passed away Nov. 6.
He was honored with a moment of silence broadcast by the department over the fire radio channel, a tribute to a man who had spent so much of his life listening to his scanner for his next fire.
Eisner donated his life’s work to the Detroit Firemen’s Fund Association, an organization with which he had worked closely. Kukula said leaders with the nonprofit are planning a party for sometime in the spring to celebrate his life.
“He was just a normal, everyday person, kind of quiet and kept to himself,” Grimshaw said. “There was nothing really very unique about him except if there was a fire, he was there all the time.”
©2024 The Detroit News. Visit detroitnews.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
Bill Eisner, who dramatically captured Detroit fires with his camera for 60 years, dies https://t.co/d9TGkBD3al via @detroitnews
— Jennifer Chambers (@jchambers_DN) November 19, 2024
