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."