A Conversation with Photographer Bruce Haley

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UR: In our first email exchange you pointed out, rightly, that you’ve done all  kinds of photography. You’re recent work is not war photography at all. But did having this piece go all over the place kind of put you back in that spot a little bit?

BH: Sure, and that’s fine.

UR: But was it hard? I’m guessing that when you put it up on your website, you didn’t expect it to go all over the place.

BH: No, I didn’t expect this. Especially places like Russian Esquire. The one thing that bothers me about the attention to the war work is that it opens up that can of worms about those execution photos. That was a huge clusterfuck in the beginning and a difficult time for me. Kill-the-messenger syndrome is always in full effect with that kind of thing.

UR: And that came back?

BH: Yeah. Somebody wrote and said, “Your credentials as a human being should be taken away from you.” When people write to me directly, sometimes I’ll answer them and say, “Hopefully I’ll see your war photography in few years.” And I never hear from them again.

UR: You handled the issue of the execution photos beautifully on your website, where you tell the story of one kid in particular, the vicious 18-year-old fighter whose parents were killed by government forces…

BH: Generational cycles of violence…

UR: You explain that whole cycle—the back story to your photos of this kid committing terrible violence.

BH: When your work is syndicated like mine was, you don’t have any control over the way it’s run. So you don’t know if any of the back story is going to be printed or if it’s just going to be used in some sensationalistic manner.

UR: Was the back story ever printed?

BH: It was, as part of a cover story for the London Sunday Times magazine, but that didn’t stave off any of the uproar. The Financial Times actually ran an editorial and some hotshot over there actually accused me of staging the pictures for the right camera angle. It’s ridiculous. I risked a lot getting all these pictures, obviously, and it comes from a place of wanting to get the word out about these little places that nobody pays much attention to. When I first started out doing that kind of work the number of journalists or photographers covering any given conflict was directly proportional to the closeness of booze and comfortable lodging. You go deep into Afghanistan or spent a lot of time in Burma and you’re not tripping over a lot of journalists in those places.

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