Bruce Dale: Farther On Up the Road

Bruce Dale is a Nikon Legend Behind the Lens.

When the busses broke down,  got off and went looking for pictures.

They'd break down periodically, often in the middle of nowhere, when he was traveling in China on assignments for National Geographic magazine. And when they did, Bruce would turn the interruptions into opportunities by simply saying, "Well, I'm just going to keep walking straight ahead, pick me up when the truck is fixed." On those walks he entered villages where the people were amazed to see a foreigner, and he was able to make pictures he could never have made otherwise.

In his career, which includes 30 years as a staff photographer for National Geographic, Bruce has always welcomed the unexpected. "If things go exactly as planned, that's nice," he says, "but anytime you plan something, you can't help but subconsciously think of something you once saw or something you already did. But the accidents—like walking into a village in China—are unique. The most exciting things often happen outside the plans. So I don't get too upset—I try to think of what I can do to make things work."

On the other hand, it was planning and forethought that brought him to some specific middles of nowhere in the first place. "I fought hard to make pictures in China in places where they didn't want me to take pictures," Bruce says. He prepared a presentation, a version of a slideshow he'd created based on a National Geographic story on American mountain people. "There were sections of the slide show that showed coal miners, moonshiners and snake handlers in Appalachia," Bruce says. "I had the narration translated into Chinese and took the slideshow with me to China and showed it [to the Chinese officials] at the beginning of my trip. I said, 'I'm going to show you parts of America that most Americans have never seen and that are now gone forever. I'm going to be traveling around here, and I know there are going to be places you don't want me to photograph, but please let me document those areas because they'll be gone someday.' That slideshow allowed me to get into a few areas where they'd said no originally."

Bruce counts his early trips to China, along with the American mountain people story and his book, Gypsies: Wanderers of the World, as the most significant work he's done, "because," he says, "I was documenting points in history that are gone forever."

For Gypsies, Bruce traveled with gypsies over a period of six months, starting in England and ending up in India. "We hired a Gypsy and his wife to travel with us as an entrance to other Gypsies, and in each country we met with anthropologists who'd been working with Gypsies. They took us to areas where there were enclaves of Gypsies, and we'd stop, meet them and photograph. We met with Gypsies in Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan—of course, you could never go to those places today. We'd go into villages and camp at night, and people would just come and talk to us and play music for us. In southern Iran there was a village in which the people spoke an unusual language. Linguists investigated and found out it was Romany, but with a European accent. It turned out that the people's ancestors had fled India at the invasion of Genghis Khan, had gone to Europe, then decided to go back to India and got as far as Iran and settled there. In their language was their history, the story of where they'd been."

Photographing for the book, Bruce traveled to so many places in such a short span of time that he was forced to photograph quickly, and he regrets that there wasn't much time to spend getting to know the people. But there was an advantage to that: "When we walked into a village, the people were doing whatever they happened to be doing. They weren't waiting for us or expecting us. I photographed them exactly as they were. If we had stayed another week or two, they would have started dressing for us and performing for us. So there's a total spontaneity and freshness to those pictures that I don't think I would have gotten if I'd spent two or three weeks with each group."

Often his dedication to his assignments was so intense that he has little memory of the moment. "Sometimes when I see my [published] photographs, I say jeez, I'd like to go there, and then, hey, wait a minute, I shot that picture! Usually you're working so darn hard you don't really appreciate the beauty of the place."

Readers of National Geographic, though, have been able to appreciate the more than 2,000 images Bruce published in the magazine on subjects ranging from the nature of time to the journeys of explorer John Wesley Powell; from aviation safety to the Santa Fe Trail. "I was more of a generalist than most Geographic photographers," he says. "I've done underwater photography, aerial images, people studies and a lot of high tech and scientific stories." Looking back on it all, he says, "If I were to go back, I might stick more with people, because I think that's more significant."

Still, it's one of Bruce's nature photographs that's achieved a unique significance: it's on the Voyager I spacecraft, which is now at the outer edge of our solar system, and that's significant enough for Bruce. "I may not have photos on display in any New York galleries," he says, "but Voyager is one gallery that's going to be around for a while."

To see more of Bruce's work visit his website.

Bruce Dale has been an NPS member since 1998.