A Conversation with Photographer Bruce Haley

Article Tools

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

Everybody was stuck into these crevices. They had us pinned down for three hours. I lost partial hearing in my right ear. Twenty-one years later, still gone. Just gone. There were so many just huge shells landing and I’m going: You know what? We need to we’ve got plenty of cover from this bank. We can make it back down this dry riverbed to this destroyed village where we staged. Just get back there.

UR: What was their response?

BH: We’re staying here! The Soviets are raking like 50 caliber fire over us and these 16-year old kids were standing up in the middle of this and yelling Allahu Akbar and firing their AK-47s. The rounds aren’t even going to reach the base! When you fervently believe you’re going to die a martyr’s death and you’ve got a shitty life to begin with…

UR: We ran two of your Burma photographs the magazine and I’m wondering if you would provide some. The first is the photograph of the soldier, barefoot and looking out over a valley. What's going on there?

BH: Not much really. It was in Burma’s southern tail. I was traveling with the Mon National Liberation Army. We walked all the way across the southern part of Burma to the Andaman Sea…

UR: Wow.

BH:...during the monsoons. It was really difficult going. We came upon this place with these stupas up on this really jagged kind of limestone-ish rock that you can see in the picture. It's fairly high—maybe a couple of hundred feet high or maybe more. Since it was a holy site, you couldn't wear shoes up there. You'll notice he's barefoot.

UR: Right.

BH: And I wanted to go up there and take some pictures of the guys on lookout. This is one of those deals where those guys have been walking barefoot through the jungle their whole lives. And me—a big, dumb friggin' white boy who is like two feet taller than all these guys—I had to pull off my shoes and climb up this jagged rock, barefooted. I was like: Shit. I think this picture is going to be worth this when I get to the top.

We also ran the photograph of the transport boat.

BH: That was the same trip, with the same guerrilla group. There was a monsoon coming in. We were in a bay right off the sea. Right after that series of pictures was taken, the freakin’ boat capsized. You see it’s overloaded—people did the wrong weight shift and the boat went right over—flipped over completely. All my gear went in the water. I was up on the wheelhouse and as it went over I had had one of my cameras around my neck—the one I had taken the series of pictures with. As it slipped I was doing that thing; like in the cartoons when they try to keep running—when somebody’s falling over, you know? I was doing that kinda thing and I actually managed to grab on to something. I went over the hull—it’s slippery and mossy and there’s nothing to grab on to. And as the wheelhouse came back over again I managed to grab on and probably three-quarters of my body was submerged; but I managed to keep the camera out of the water.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print