Kent Porter - Press Democrat Photojournalist Extraordinaire - "You Have to Be There When it Happens."
Our speaker on April 3, 2025, was Kent Porter, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat’s staff photographer. Kent has been with the PD for 38 years and is part of the PD team that won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the October 2017 Tubbs fire. Kent’s photos have been published worldwide, and many are instantly recognizable by the PD’s readers. He is a prize-winning photojournalist who likes to spend his vacations chasing storms.
Kent showed us many of his photographs and discussed how he got the shots and what made his shots different from those taken by other photographers. One interesting point is that Kent drives a 4-wheel drive vehicle, which allows him to go places other photographers can’t. Kent showed us his famous photo of a burning oak tree in Knights Valley in the second week of the Kincaide Fire. He and other photographers took photos of a sleeping firefighter. Kent drove off, passed an oak tree, and doubled back to the tree. He took photos of the tree from different angles and fiddled with the exposures. During one of the photos, Ken was amazingly lucky capturing a large meteorite as it flashed behind the tree, combined with sparks from flying flaming embers exploding off the tree’s limbs. Kent says that sometimes you have to just hang around to get the great shots. Photographers just have to be there when it happens!
Kent also has amazing stories about the Tubbs Fire, including the one about the woman with cancer who put family photos in a locked box in the family home near Coffey Park. The woman passed away before the fire, but the locked box of family photos survived the fire because a cast iron bathtub on the home’s second floor flipped over when the second floor fell, somehow trapping the box of photos inside its nearly fireproof protection! Kent showed us other amazing photos from his many years of photojournalism, including the Glass Fire from the Skyhawk vantage, the August 2024 Lake County fire, Tubbs Fire, Boyles Fire in Lake County, lots of storm chasing photos, the Aurora Borealis from Clear Lake, a total eclipse from Texas, the Atlas Comet at the Geysers, a baseball practice during a drought in Southwest Texas, Pt. Reyes National Seashore, arguments between a Trump supporter and a protester, a Halloween wedding, a child eating at a cheesesteak festival, St. Patrick’s Day parade in Healdsburg, Black Lives Matters protesters, mudslide damage to a home in Rio Nido, a Special Olympics polar plunge, and many others.
Kent also spoke about the adverse effects of so many years photographing catastrophic events, including the fact that PTSD is fairly common among photographers who spend their lives chasing catastrophe. The Tubbs Fire in particular was particularly devastating to him.
Thank you so much, Kent, for enriching our lives with your amazing photography and for the fantastic presentation.
