  We study the electromagnetic coupling of massless higher-spin fermions in
flat space. Under the assumptions of locality and Poincare invariance, we
employ the BRST-BV cohomological methods to construct consistent
parity-preserving off-shell cubic 1-s-s vertices. Consistency and
non-triviality of the deformations not only rule out minimal coupling, but also
restrict the possible number of derivatives. Our findings are in complete
agreement with, but derived in a manner independent from, the
light-cone-formulation results of Metsaev and the string-theory-inspired
results of Sagnotti-Taronna. We prove that any gauge-algebra-preserving vertex
cannot deform the gauge transformations. We also show that in a local theory,
without additional dynamical higher-spin gauge fields, the non-abelian vertices
are eliminated by the lack of consistent second-order deformations.
