"Bruce Dale: Planning for the Unplanned (Part 1)"

[00:00:03] The hard part about the early stories was, first of all, we were not given a script to work from. We were given an assignment and it was up to us to decide how to do it. And I don't know where the idea came from the story on time, for example, but every single thing I researched about time was that we really don't know what time is. It was up to me to try to illustrate that and that led from one thing to another. I said to Bob Gilkes, I want to do a photographic pun called killing time. I want to photograph bullets going through watches. Sure, go ahead and try it.

[00:00:33] So I photographed a cesium atom from an atomic clock. I photographed a most expensive watch I could find encrusted in diamonds. And I photographed our human heart, which is our ticker. And to do that, I wanted to photograph a heart transplant. And at that time, Dr. Bailey was working at Loma Linda in California. And he let me come along to photograph a heart transplant in a baby, in a child. Baby, it was six weeks old. Not even that, no, he was less than a month old, a couple of weeks old.

[00:01:00] And then I wanted to point back and photograph a girl at one year old and five years old, then 10 and 15 and 20 years old. So I keep in touch with her. Greetings and welcome back to the show. Sometimes a childhood dream can take you further than you ever have planned.

[00:01:22] For some, it starts with a National Geographic map on a bedroom wall and leads to 30 years traveling the world for the magazine with the camera and a lifetime of unexpected adventures. I'm Don Jacob, and this is the Camera Cafe Show. Today, folks, I'm joined by former National Geographic staff photographer Bruce Dale, an explorer, inventor, and a wonderful storyteller whose curiosity has taken him across more than 75 countries and occasionally into situations that no amount of planning could ever have predicted.

[00:01:52] In this week's first part of my conversation with Bruce, we traveled to his childhood in Ohio, where a National Geographic magazine first opened his eyes to a world far beyond his bedroom. From there, his journey followed an unexpected road through newspaper photography and into what Bruce calls the platinum years of National Geographic, where there was the time and the resources to turn wild ideas into great photography. And if the equipment needed to make a photograph didn't exist, they simply built it.

[00:02:21] Of course, you also hear some amazing stories behind some of Bruce's most iconic photographs, and in this first part, we already lined up quite a few, from bathing in the Ozarks to freezing a bullet in midair. In part two next week, we continue with even more behind-the-scenes stories, unexpected adventures, and a photograph that has traveled much further than Bruce could ever have imagined. More than 15 billion miles away now, and counting.

[00:02:45] Grab yourself a coffee, open your world map, and enjoy part one of my conversation with the amazing Bruce Dale.

[00:03:19] Welcome back, everyone. His curiosity, wherever it happens to lead. Bruce, it's a pleasure to have you on the show tonight. Thank you. It's good to be here. Bruce, what is the best piece of photography advice you ever got in your life? Wow. Best piece of photographic advice. Holy smokes. You can mean anything. I think probably, I would have to quote Bob Gilke, who I worked for many years. He was the boss at National Geographic.

[00:03:47] And he once said, he used to say that there are a lot of really good photographers out there. He said, photographers are a dime a dozen. I can get good photographers. What I really need is people with good ideas. There are a lot of good photographers. What I really need are people with good ideas. So I guess that was one thing that sticks with me, that there is a lot of competition. And so coming up with a good idea is sometimes difficult, but it's really a real challenge. And I like to think that I did come up with ideas.

[00:04:15] And Bob was the kind of guy that supported me. So if I said that I have an idea, I want to take my toy tank and turn it into a roadrunner and see if I can bring up wild roadrunners. But I need to build this thing. Sure enough, go ahead, try it. So no matter how wild or how seemingly absurd things might be, he would say, man, go try it. It was an opportunity to really do imaginative things without feeling guilty about it later on.

[00:04:44] If they didn't work out, no, it didn't work out. You see? Nice advice. Now, Bruce, I know you have been building those water sprinklers in your garden to scare away deer, not eating your flowers. This has worked out or not? Actually, I did. I got one deer and I got my girlfriend five times and I got myself about eight or nine times. Yeah, it worked fine. And it's interesting.

[00:05:10] The deer that I did get was a few weeks ago and they've never come back. I think they have a really good memory. I had a little video set up too. So I have a video of the deer setting off the sprinkler and racing across the street into the neighbor's yard. And I have never seen them come back. So I think they have good memories. I can't say the same for chipmunks. I know somebody who also has a good memory, Bruce, because you have a lot of stories for us.

[00:05:37] I don't know about the memory, but I'll do my best if you have anything. Now, Bruce, long before National Geographic, when you close your eyes and you go back to Ohio as a little boy, what's the very first image that pops up in your mind? I think I know it must have been. It must have been 1944. And I was in the first grade at a Catholic school in Lakewood, Ohio. And we were collecting newspapers for the war effort.

[00:06:07] And I would go from neighbor to neighbor, collecting newspapers, and I would drag them to school. And at school, the school was called St. Clement's, in the yard, the play yard was asphalt. And every grade had a big chalk mark marking off their territory. And so there was a competition between grades. And in our stack of, in the middle of the bigger area was sectioned off for newspapers. And on the side were magazines.

[00:06:34] And I was looking at the magazines, and I found a National Geographic magazine. And I thought, wow. And I sat down on these tied bundles of magazines, and I was reading this magazine, looking at these pictures in National Geographic magazine. I don't remember what the stories were. I tried to go back and figure it out, but I don't know which issue it was. But then the nun said, Bruce, you can take that home if you want, but bring it back tomorrow. So I did. I took it home, and I went through there page by page. And when I brought it back, she gave me the map from the magazine.

[00:07:03] And so I took the map, and I hung it on my wall. And all I could do was imagine all those marvelous places all over the world. And I suspect that's probably had something to do with my direction in life. I think it goes back to those magazines. I don't know what the—I have no idea. I think there were some—it was during the war, and so they had a lot of stories from the Asia area. And it was probably one of those.

[00:07:27] I don't remember any of the typical naked women that they were probably—the magazine was probably scanned beforehand by the nuns. But now you say adventure, Bruce. I know you were also riding freight trains as a young man. This was also— Freight trains. Let's just see what is around the next corner. Where did you hear that? Riding freight trains. Yeah, we used to—we had a railroad that went near our house, and we would get up there and hop on the trains and ride them a little ways.

[00:07:54] And then they'd stop, and we had a—there was a set area where they—where their cars were stopped, and we used to take cigarettes up there, and we would smoke. We would each—one of the kids in my group would bring a different type of cigarettes, and so we'd write it on the wall, Marlboro camels. We had a collection. And we did that until one day I heard somebody yelling, come on with your hands up, come on with your hands up. And I stuck my head out the window. And there was an older man there with a pistol, and he was waving it at us.

[00:08:23] I said, get him down. I've got you covered. Get down out there. And so I got arrested, along with a guy by the name of Bobby Begin. And if you were to research that, you'd find out that he had a lot—he became quite an anti-war character. He's the one that came to Washington, and along with a group of other priests, he became a priest. And by the way, it was embarrassing for him to get arrested with me because he was the nephew of the Bishop of Cleveland. And Bobby—I went to court. Or Bobby—I think Bobby got—he did get caught. Yeah, he got caught, too.

[00:08:52] Most of the other kids just took off and ran. And so that was part of that railroad thing. That was the only time I smoked in my life, too. I should add, I had an uncle that helped raise me. In fact, he was a photographer for many years in the 1920s, 1930s. And he once told me, he said, Bruce, I don't care if you smoke, but if you—don't do it behind my back. And he said, what my advice, don't ever smoke. It's a filthy, dirty habit, and you'll always regret it. And so I took his advice. His name was Charlie. Uncle Charlie, I called him.

[00:09:20] And he also had a trucking company. And he sold the trucking company. But having a trucking company, he knew how to pack. He could pack a truck. So he could put three times as much stuff in a truck as anybody else could. And he taught me how to pack his stuff. I got used to having these. Any car I've ever owned, when I unpacked that trunk, it was impossible to think you could have gotten all that stuff in the trunk of that car, like photographic gear. So that's what my Uncle Charlie taught me. And also photography. He was a very early photographer.

[00:09:47] He told me that one time that his assignment was to photograph unidentified bodies at the morgue. And so he had to take them out of their little cells or their little tables and he would stand them up against the wall and photograph them. So I don't know if that affected my photography or made it more interesting. But I do remember that. Yeah. Uncle Charlie. And where we were talking about it, we get off on a tangent. We were talking about something totally different, I'm sure. Trains, right? Yeah, trains. Yeah.

[00:10:17] One of my early, one of my favorite pictures is a nice picture of a steam engine in Cleveland with their old terminal tower in the background. Down at a place called the Flats, which was where the Cuyahoga River went through on the rim where all the metal steel mills were. Where did you leap from school into your first professional photography job? When? Well, how it went.

[00:10:40] From that kindergarten experience, I guess the next serious photography step was probably several years later. I always had an interest in photography because of my aunt and uncle. But probably around the sixth or seventh grade, I was with a neighbor down the street during the summer. And we were talking about developing film. And he said his dad knew how to do it. So we went and asked his dad. And his dad said, go to the library and get a book. So we did that. And then we went to the local drug. At that time, at a pharmacy or a drugstore, you could buy all the accounts. Chemicals for developing.

[00:11:10] So we bought all the chemicals. Came over, went over to my house. And my mother had a roll of film she wanted to develop. So I said, I'll do it for you, Mom. I'll do it. So we developed the roll of film. That was one of my first lessons. And so that if it's wrapped in green paper, that means it's panchromatic. It can see all the colors. And so you can't use a red safe light. So I totally ruined that roll of film for her. And she never, ever let me develop film for her after that. Yeah. And then from there, a year or two later, I was in high school at Lakewood St. Ed's.

[00:11:38] And we had a camera club, which I joined. And it was run by a brother of Holy Cross who graduated from Brooks Institute of Photography. So he was more than the average amateur photographer. And he taught me, gave me a lot of lessons. And I continued taking pictures all through high school. I worked at a studio. I worked at a camera store. By the time I got out of high school, I had about 50 pictures published in the local newspapers.

[00:12:04] These were pictures taken chasing fire engines or sirens or all of the football and basketball games at school. And so I had a pretty good portfolio. And when I got out of high school, I wound up working for a year at Cleveland Clinic Hospital. I don't remember how I ever, why, oh, I know how I got that job. It was a strange way. I had a really bad lisp at that time, which I learned about from a friend of mine who,

[00:12:30] after I rescued him from a dilemma in his life, he got a fishing hook right through his ear. And I happened to have a little, in my fishing case, I had a pair of pliers, needle nose pliers. And I cut off the barb and I took the fishing rod out of his ear. His name was Peter Yesup. I don't know whatever happened to Peter. But Peter says to me, Bruce, he says, I really like you. I don't care if the kids laugh at the way you talk. And I'm thinking, what are you talking about? He says, you talk funny. I didn't know that. And then I learned I had a bad lisp.

[00:13:00] And how I picked that up, I don't know. And I told my mother I had a lisp. She said, oh, that's cute. And I'm like, cute, are you kidding? And I think maybe when I was really young, I wanted it to be a ventriloquist. And so I was trying to put my tongue in a different part of the mouth. So I couldn't say S, the little S. And I would say S. I said, S. So my name was Bruce. And Cleveland Clinic had a really good audio department or an audiologist or speech therapist. And I heard about it.

[00:13:30] And so that's why I went there, applied for a job. I worked there for a year as a photographer. But they did a recording. And the doctor said, you're putting your tongue in the wrong place. She said, you have to learn to say, she saw Sister Susie sitting on the seashore selling seashells. Took me years to get over that. I would say, she saw Sister Susie sitting on the seashell selling seashells. And it's easy now, but it took a year to say that. So that's how I got the job at the Cleveland Clinic, where I worked with some incredible doctors.

[00:13:59] At that time, they were doing the leading research on heart transplants and heart machines. I worked with a man by the name of Dr. Effler and another man by the name of Dr. Mason Soans. And I would sometimes, they would want to work late at night. And so I would work overtime late at night. And I would go out to dinner with Dr. Soans. And we went over to a little place called the Kewpie Hut. And many years later in life, I came across him in California where he had moved.

[00:14:24] And it came on to giving me access to some photographs I never could have made because I knew him. So one thing in life I guess you'll learn is no matter, be kind to everybody because no matter who you hit his, you're going to wind up coming across them later in life or maybe even working for them. Who knows? You never know. And so that was where I worked at Cleveland Clinic for a year.

[00:14:45] Biggest lesson I learned was everything had to be, I worked for a man who was really, I hate to use the word anal, but boy, he made me write down in a notebook exactly how I shot every picture. We had shot all the stuff in surgery and post-surgery with two and a quarter, three and a quarter film. And I had to hand process it. And I learned quite, I learned a lot from him. And, but then I left there finally. It just got to the point where I wanted to do other things.

[00:15:10] And from there that summer, it must have been my sophomore year, I was visiting a friend of mine that had a cottage on Lake Erie. And while I was visiting him, they happened to get a newspaper from Toledo Blade. And I was impressed. And so on the next day, I called it Blade. And I asked for the photographic department. And I said, look, I really love those pictures. I would love to know more about your photography. And the guy that answered the phone, it was Bruce Sinner. Here were his photographs. So talk about luck. He answered.

[00:15:40] And then he says, oh, wow. He said, you've got, I'm sure he was thinking, wow, he's got good taste. But anyways, he said, you're really lucky. We have a photographer that just quit this week. And that's true. There was a guy that quit. And so the next day I went there with my portfolio from pictures. And they hired me for temporary for a few weeks. And I wound up staying for seven years at the Toledo Blade. And where I spent every one of my summer vacations or breaks that I had.

[00:16:07] And everyone was at some workshop, attending a workshop like Syracuse University, Missouri workshop, one in Miami. And so I guess I had one credit hour at each one of these universities. But at these workshops, I met people from National Geographic. And at the University of Missouri workshop, I was assigned to work under an editor named Bob Gilka, who shortly after that became the director of National Geographic. And then he asked me to do a first.

[00:16:34] The very first assignment, by the way, was the Ambassador Bridge, which is now in the news. That's the bridge between Windsor and Detroit, Michigan. The one that Trump keeps trying to shut down and they keep opening it up. But that was my very first picture. And then I did a short thing. And they wanted pictures of Indiana Dune State Park near Chicago. And they said they'd pay me for a day to go up there. And so I went up there. But I spent three days. And I was up at dawn taking pictures on the dunes. And I found people skinny dipping in the water at those.

[00:17:03] And I think they were impressed with the number of pictures that I got in one day. But it really was three days. Three days. And then after that, Bob asked me if I would do a story in the city of St. Louis, which I said yes, but I'd have to do it on my vacation. And they said sure. So working at the Toledo Blade, it was a union newspaper. And there was a clause in the contract that you were entitled to a number of days for every year you'd been there. And I'd been there seven years. So I had an extra almost two weeks.

[00:17:33] So I went there with a week of vacation, another couple weeks, and started a story in the city of St. Louis. Where I did some, I had some lucky pictures. I had, I got a room overlooking the arch, which was under construction. And I woke up one morning. And I do this all the time. I try to get a room that somehow might lead to a picture later on. But one morning I woke up at this room overlooking the arch. And it was totally fog up for about halfway up.

[00:17:58] And so all you could see was the upper arch popping out of the clouds, like something like a jack in the beanstalk. So I got that picture. And then I did some other things that were unusual. I opened up a hole on the top of the planetarium. I did an eight-hour time exposure looking down through the planetarium. And near the end, they said, we've got a great collection of pictures. We want to do some more. Can you stay longer? And I said, I'm sorry, but I can't. And they said, how about working for us full time? And I thought, wow. And I went home and talked over with my wife.

[00:18:27] By then I was married and I had two children and two boys. And Joyce said, we talked about it. And I never met my father until I was 16 years old. And so I always regretted that. And I didn't want my kids to grow up like that. So we talked it over and we decided we would do it for one year or three years at the most. I knew if I didn't do it, I'd be sorry the rest of my life. So I did it. And all of a sudden, it was 30 years. But Bob Gilka was a great boss. And there was never a time when I couldn't come home for an important event.

[00:18:57] And I was able to tolerate it and never complained about me. I often took my boys with me. I had another son born after I joined and often take the boys with me one at a time, which was nice because they realized I wasn't playing on these trips, that I was actually working. And it got a chance for me to bond with them one-on-one. So he wasn't sharing them with their brothers. So the kids were with me in Alaska, Kenya, all over Europe, Mexico, other places. So they traveled with me one at a time, which in my case, it worked out well.

[00:19:28] Bruce, I know you refer to this era as the platinum years. What made it so special? Oh, wow. There's so many things that almost sound silly because some people would say, you spoiled brat. But we had an infinite amount of time for a story, any equipment we needed. And if you couldn't buy it, we had a machine shop that would actually make stuff for us.

[00:19:55] And we had the best lab in the country with an unlimited expense account. If you wanted to rent a helicopter, if you think it might be better for me, go ahead, rent a helicopter. And if it doesn't look good at sunset, try it in the morning. And if it doesn't look good in the morning, try it again and try it again. I remember doing that with a helicopter in Hong Kong when many years ago it was $500 an hour. And that's probably $4,000 now, today's money.

[00:20:17] But all of this said, it didn't make my job any easier because there was never, ever a reason to say you didn't get a picture. You can't say I didn't have the camera. I didn't have enough time. We had to get the picture. And we were treated nice. We weren't paid much. When I left the Geographic and did advertising, I was making more in one day than I made in my first year at the Geographic. And we had a secretary. I had a private office, a camera equipment locker.

[00:20:46] We were given DOD cards. A DOD card is a Department of Defense card, which rarely anybody could get. That allowed you to go into military bases or embassies anywhere in the world. That disappeared. We were given, I had not just business cards, but raised lettering cards, beautiful cards, and stationery. And all the travel at the beginning was first class, even up to Chicago. So it changed a lot from then to when I left there. It was, how can you do it the cheapest?

[00:21:16] I can answer anybody you can stay with. I stayed at one of the finest hotels in the world. It's the Peninsula. And when I worked in, I often, I stayed there for weeks at a time on occasions. We had our own travel department that would make all arrangements for us. So we had nice perks. We were not paid much at all. But we had, the end result was that you had to get a picture. And they expected something better than normal. If you have months and months time to make a story, Bruce,

[00:21:44] how often did an assignment begin as a story and end up being or becoming something completely different? I don't remember it coming up completely different, but I remember a lot of stories where you start with something and that winds up to becoming another story. So I've had at least 10 stories in the magazine that were stories that evolved out of one story. So I would be in Alaska and I'd say, wow, that's really interesting work going on with timber up here. Let's do a story on timber.

[00:22:12] Or I was in the Ozarks photographing mountain people in the Ozarks and I met a family. I said, hey, this would make a great family picture. And I was doing a story on desert adaptations. And while doing the desert adaptations, I came across a roadrunner that befriended me. And I said, let's do a story on roadrunners. And so they evolve into other stories. I had very few stories that I worked on that did not get published.

[00:22:36] Sometimes when I would meet with Life Magazine photographers, one of the comments that I could sometimes make was that when they're wrapping the garbage with your Life Magazine, they're binding ours in leather. But Life Magazine photographers, I knew they did a lot of stories that never got published. A lot of them. The hard part about our stories, the early stories, was, first of all, we did not give up. We were not giving a script to work from.

[00:23:02] We were given an assignment and it was up to us to decide how to do it. And I don't know where the idea came from the story on time, for example. But every single thing I researched about time was that we really don't know what time is. It was up to me to try to illustrate that. And that led to, from one thing to another, trying to stop time, a photographic pun to, for example, doing the time story. I said to Bob Gilk, I said, I want to do a photographic pun called killing time.

[00:23:30] I want to photograph bullets going through watches. Sure, go ahead and try it. So we did that. It got published. For the time story, I wanted to photograph clocks of various types. So I photographed a cesium atom from an atomic clock. I photographed a most expensive watch I could find, some encrusted in diamonds. And I photographed our human heart, which is our ticker. And to do that, I had to, I wanted to photograph a heart transplant. And at that time, Dr. Bailey, I think. No, Dr. Oh, God, I can't remember his name.

[00:24:00] He was working at Loma Linda in California. And he let me come along to photograph a heart transplant in a baby, in a child. Baby was about six weeks old. Not even that. He was less than a month old, a couple weeks old. And then I wound up going back and photographing her at one year old and five years old, then 10 and 15 and 20 years old. So I keep in touch with her. Well, those are the ideas. And it's up to you to decide how to do it. I had a story on automobiles. How do you photograph automobiles? So you have to think what.

[00:24:28] I decided that I would try to synthesize it into how people look, how various countries look at cars. And in France, they were interested in smoothness. I photographed the Peugeot's robots driving cars on bumpy roads. In Italy, they make these hand-built cars at Rolls Royce. So I went there and photographed them. You wouldn't last like they're making a shoe, bending fenders. And in the U.S., I summed it up by advertising.

[00:24:55] And so I went out to Hollywood where they were doing this extravaganza photograph ad for one of the magazines. In Germany, of course, the engineering. I photographed. In Italy, the beautiful cars. I went to Pina Fariot and I met who was a great designer. Who's the guy that designed one of the Ferraris? He's called Enzo, I think, but I'm not sure. He has a Pina. But anyways, so it's up to me. What I'm getting at is we got this story. How you do it is up to you.

[00:25:23] How you interpret it. And there was never a list of, oh, go here and photograph this person or that. Some of the stories were difficult because of that. And for example, in the city of one of the early stories I did on the Ozarks was you wound up going there and it was like building a house and not knowing ahead of time whether you're going to make a brick house or a straw house or a wooden house. And you wind up coming back with everything. And then the editor, we're going to make it a stone house.

[00:25:53] So you have all this garbage. That was difficult. And a lot of that depended on the editor you were working with. Some were great. You're dependent on the editor you're working with because he stands up for you in the field. He's the one that's saying he's doing great or he's doing a lousy job or he's wasting time or something. And if you take me, for example, to get an idea how you work, Bruce, to China, because you find yourself in places where the language is different, the culture is different, the customs are different.

[00:26:21] How are you building trust with the people there? Oh, I spent about, I made at least 10 trips to China. One of the trips, I had put together a slideshow called American Mountain People. And it was about the American South, the Ozarks, Rockies, Sierra's and Appalachian Mountains. And in this slideshow, there were sections on snake handling churches, a section in the coal mines.

[00:26:49] There were pictures of places that most Americans have never been or maybe never even heard of. So I took this slideshow with me to China, which was not an easy task because I had, back then it was multiple projectors and immediately tape. I had a quadraphonic tape recorder and stereo speakers. I took all this with me. And I would show it to my hosts. And with the main purpose of trying to say, look, I want to show you parts of America that most Americans have never seen.

[00:27:18] And I want you to realize that when I'm out taking pictures, I'm really documenting on era. And please don't be ashamed to show me pictures or show me to photograph places, which they were. And there were a lot of fights over whether I could photograph certain things or not. But that was one of the ways. I took lessons in Chinese. And at one point, I got to the point where I could understand what they were talking, which alarmed them greatly.

[00:27:46] And one of them confessed to me that one of the Chinese proverbs is, beware of foreign devils speaking Chinese. But most of all, I found the people genuine and really interesting. And a little bit, of course, oversensitive to allowing their country being seen in a negative way. This was early. This was before most people were going to China back in the late 70s. Before we go on, Bruce, because before you talked about luck, what role does luck play,

[00:28:15] you think, in photography for you? Certainly a great role. And I would almost rather call it serendipity. And if I made a wrong turn in the mountains, I never looked at it thinking, damn it, I made the wrong turn. I would always kind of be an optimist and say, oh, I wonder if this is what I'm going to discover here. I don't think I ever went off on a task to shoot something without an idea in mind.

[00:28:44] But in reality, that is not the picture that I wanted. What I was really looking for was that serendipitous moment that would happen that I would never think of in a thousand years. So serendipity. And luck is actually being prepared, too. If you want to get hit by lightning, you're not going to get hit by lightning. Sitting here at my desk, I've got to go out on a rainy day with a sealed rod in my hand. So you have to put yourself in places where luck is going to happen if you want something to happen. And this is not a part of luck.

[00:29:14] But my next question would be, so when you were a young photographer, Bruce, did you ever imagine that maybe some of the people you photographed would still be part of your life 50 years later? And then talking, I suppose, about shy eyes, the picture. Yeah. No, I didn't think of that when I shot it. Although it just happens gradually. Certain things like that happen. And I keep in touch with a lot of the friends.

[00:29:42] And I'm always curious to know where their life has taken them and how, if any, I may have affected their life. I do remember one girl that wrote to me about, gosh, it's got to be 15 years ago. Now I lost the letter. And I've always regretted that I didn't really frame it and follow through on it. And while I was doing an early story on the Ozarks, I decided to ride in a school bus.

[00:30:06] And so I rode on the school bus up and down the hills of the Ozarks where they picked up people. I did that to photograph them getting on and off the school to see where they lived, who lived where. And I would go back sometimes to the farms or village or their houses and meet them later on. But stepping forward, that was back in the 60s, 60, 68, 69, 70, 72.

[00:30:32] And around, I guess it must be to me, 2015, I got this letter from somebody that said, you don't know me. But I was on that school bus you were riding one day in the Ozarks. And I was thinking, boy, wouldn't that be a neat way to make a living? And I decided to become a photographer. And I work for the so-and-so newspaper. And I lost that. And I tried forever to find out who she was. But I don't know. Maybe if she's listening to this someday, she can get back in touch with me.

[00:31:01] Talk me a bit about Shy Eyes a moment before we go on. Oh, Shy Eyes is a lady that I met only a few weeks ago after not seeing her for over 50 years. It was 19, I guess it was 1970, around then. Her grandfather was a mailman in the mountains of Kentucky, a very rural area called Pip-Up Passes. And I went there to photograph her grandpa delivering mail. And she was about six years old.

[00:31:30] And she would ride on the back of his pony while he was delivering mail. So I have these nice pictures of her riding on the back of her grandpa's pony. And also a picture I took of her peeking around the corner of a porch. And really just sneaking a peek at me. And we published that picture. We called it Shy Eyes. Anyway, she wrote to me several years ago. And she said, I'm the little girl you call Shy Eyes. And also on the deck of my damnedest pony. So we've been in touch. And recently, only a few weeks ago, I went back to see her in Pip-Up Passes.

[00:32:01] Which I followed Google Maps to go there. And they took me in the shortest route, which included about a one-lane road about 10 miles through the mountains. And it was a very rural area. But it was a really nice day. And I'll see her again, I'm sure, somewhere. I met with her and her sister. We went back to the schoolhouse where they went to school. We went back to their house where she was living back then. And we went and visited her grandpa's gravesite. He used to ride 17 miles a day on his pony delivering mail.

[00:32:29] And he told me, he said, I had to draw a line. He said, I no longer deliver mail-order tires. Talking about kids, Bruce, before we move on to the picture part of our talk. What have photographs taught your own grandchildren, Bruce, about the world we live in?

[00:32:53] Well, I would, not so much the pictures, but traveling with me and helping me on some of these assignments. And made them realize that, you know, for example, if they were with me and I'm working on my automobile story. These people that are designing cars are just ordinary people. It's not magic. They're actually doing this. And I think all of my kids, my boys, I have three boys. They're all not afraid to take on a task no matter what it is.

[00:33:23] I'm proud of them. And they don't know whether they've learned anything from any specific picture, except maybe just traveling with me to realize that these are like, consist of ordinary people. It's like you and I. They're not. But, Bruce, I was asking about your grandchildren, the one you made. Oh, the grandchildren. Well, the grandchildren. I thought you were talking about my children. Gray are going forward another generation. Wow. I'll have to ask them.

[00:33:52] I'm going to see some of them this summer. Next Friday, actually. My two grandchildren are coming down from the Boston area and we'll spend several days together. I have a grandson in North Carolina that's super interested in all of my photography and really wants to know about all of my pictures.

[00:34:17] I don't remember any individual picture that I'm sure that they've heard all the stories about the pictures that I've done and they probably are interested in those stories. But I don't remember any specific picture that might have affected them in any way. Well, Bruce, they might know the stories, but we don't know them still. I picked five pictures of you. Let's see how far we get.

[00:34:47] First, let's start, Bruce, with one of your most famous photographs, the woodcarver's daughter. Take me back to that day in the Ozarks and how this picture came about. Okay, you're talking about the picture of Terry Denton, the woodcarver's daughter. I call it the woodcarver's daughter. I was... This is another story that evolved. I was doing a story of American mountain people and in the Ozarks. And this is a story that I... Oh, I'd heard about a family, a woodcarver.

[00:35:14] Very well-known woodcarver by the name of Ivan Denton that lived in a remote part of the Boston Mountains of Arkansas, of the Ozarks, and had four daughters. And they were all... Everybody liked to carve with wood. So I decided to visit him and introduce myself. I flew out to Fort Smith, Arkansas on Ozark Airlines. On the way, the stewardess passed out these jelly donuts, which to this day are, I think,

[00:35:44] were the most delicious jelly donuts I've ever had. I don't know. I made a comment to her and she said, oh, here's another one. So she handed me an extra jelly donut, which I stuck in my camera case. So I got off the plane. I drove to Mountainburg, Arkansas, which is near Riven's place, about 30 miles north in the mountains. And I turned off the highway, drove about two miles down a hill into the woods. And then I turned off of there into a little one-lane road and drove through a couple of fords, about a half a mile back to his house.

[00:36:13] And Ivan was sitting there in front of his house that he built himself, a little stone house. And he was carving a horse that he had tied to a fence, a rail fence. He wasn't expecting me, but it was just like he was expecting me. It looked like a Cecil B. DeMille setup already when I arrived. And I introduced myself. And Ivan was the only person in the 30 years I worked for The Geographic. He's the only one that said, can I prove it?

[00:36:40] And so I had to pull out a proof of identification. So he said, OK. So we chatted. And it was a hot day. And we took pictures of him carving. And he introduced me to his family. He had four daughters. And then he said, let's go down to the creek and go swimming. So all of us went down to the creek. And in the meantime, I had a Halliburton case, a silver Halliburton case. And in there was a 500-millimeter mirror lens, a compact lens. And I wanted to use that lens. And so I took it out of my Halliburton case to put in my camera case.

[00:37:10] But there was no room because of the jelly donut. So I took the jelly donut and put it in. It fit perfectly where the 500-millimeter lens was in my silver case. So I took it. We went down to the creek. And I'm taking pictures of the family in the water. And Terry Denton is out in the water. She's a very pretty girl. She must have been about 19 or 20 at the time. And I'm taking pictures of her. And she says, what do you got in that silver case over there? And I said, those are my jelly donuts. She said, oh, come on. And I said, sure do you want one. And she said, and I opened up this case and pulled out a jelly donut.

[00:37:40] And that was when I made that picture with that funny expression. And so that's my jelly donut story. And so Terry, so I went back often to visit them and other friends of theirs. But I never went back to the family. Even until today, when I go back there, I take along jelly donuts. Terry was an excellent woodcarver. But she also suffered. She was undiagnosed at that time with depression. And she was diagnosed later. And when she was 35 years old, she died of an overdose of prescribed medicine.

[00:38:10] Sad. I went back to the funeral. I helped carry her casket. It was a rare cold day for the Ozark. It went to 17 below zero. And while we were carrying the coffin, the trees shook violently. And that night, her father's cabin burned down. And I failed to tell you that in the meantime, after I met them, Ivan divorced his wife and remarried somebody else and built another cabin in that valley, which Terry hated. So all this happened that day.

[00:38:40] And I'm sure that Terry would have been reveled in the drama of that day. And they had a closed casket for her. And on the casket, they had that framed picture of her. And they said, this is the way we want to remember her. And we want to remember her like this. Yeah. Sad story. And I kept in touch with Ivan. I saw him a few years ago before he died. And I keep in touch with his other daughters. You still keep in touch with them now, Bruce?

[00:39:10] Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Laura is one of the ones I keep in touch with most. Laura. They were... Laura is a very smart girl. And won an essay contest. I once came to Washington and stayed with her. I showed her around the city. Her name is Laura. It was sad. So wood carvings from them? I have a couple, yeah. Yeah? Nice. Yeah. Laura isn't carving as much as her sisters. Adina, the youngest one, who was a baby when I...

[00:39:38] She was in diapers when I photographed that river scene, the creek scene. Laura, she teaches wood carving. Her janitor, older sister Janet, also a very accomplished wood carver. They're all both in the Fayetteville, Arkansas area. Yeah. Uh-huh. Just to know a bit, Bruce, what kind of cameras were you using at that time? Do you remember? They're probably Nikons. Nikons. When I went to work at the Geographic, I started with... And then when I started there, they said, what do you want?

[00:40:08] And I said, what can I have? And they said, you can have anything you want within a reason. Plus one thing without... That's not within a reason. But I started with Leicas. The head of that equipment department was a guy by the name of Bud Wishard. And he used to... He had a direct phone line to the local camera store. So if you wanted something, you'd pick up the phone and it would... He'd say, bring me over here to Leica. Two Leica M3s, a black one if you've got one. And 15 minutes would be over. We'd be at the Geographic. So I was using Leicas. And it was Bud that said, here, take one of these Nikons and try it. You might like it. So I played with it.

[00:40:38] And it was like looking at a Kodachrome slide because you're looking at the single-end reflex. So I wound up carrying both of them for a while. I had both. And unfortunately, the Leicas, I found that were not as rugged as the Leicas. They're so beautifully made. They're like a Swiss watch. So if you get a bit of sand in there or cold weather, they were not very tolerant in below zero weather. They were made too close. Whereas the Nikons are a little sloppier.

[00:41:05] So they would tolerate 10 or 20, 30 below zero temperatures much easier. So eventually, I wound up using almost all Nikons. I had anything else I wanted to use as a tool when I needed to. I think for every single picture, there probably is a perfect camera. But there's only so much you can carry. On some of my trips to China, I would carry 10, 12 suitcases. And the last trips I took to China, I used to carry only what I could carry. A backpack, a tripod.

[00:41:32] Really went lightweight, which I found much better, but much more efficient. And film-wise, if you go to the Ozarks there, what do you bring? One bag of film? Oh, if I worked in the Ozarks, no. I never carried bags of film. We usually—our film was, I wouldn't say custom-made, but hand-picked from Kodak. And they would give us an emulsion number, and our lab would run tests of it.

[00:42:00] And they would say, if this Kodakromb is not 50, you've got to shoot it at 60 or 65. And then they'd buy 500 or 600 rolls. And so I'd buy them in botches. I would take the film, and I would pull them out of the boxes because that wasted space. And then put them in Tupperware or something plastic like that and keep them that way. I would shoot pictures. I had 30 little or 50 little tabs of plastic tape on my camera case. And I'd put numbers in each one. One to 50 at the start. Then 51 to 100.

[00:42:28] Because we were shooting different films, when I put a roll of film in the camera, I'd put a number on the top of it. So that was roll one. And sometimes, of course, you'd have 200 film speed. You'd have indoor film. You'd have Kodachrome for daylight. Sometimes you'd have Ektachrome. So it's not like today where you can just turn the dial and change it from 100 to 32,000. You know, fast film speed was 200. I remember one of the memos we got, there's a new film out that's 200 ISO. You can use it, but don't photograph people with it because you can't trust it. The low quality is terrible.

[00:42:58] So I would carry film carefully like that. And I would throw these numbers on the cameras. And when I shipped the film back, I would ship all the even numbers, one to ship and the odd numbers and another. So that way, if there was a disaster where the film got lost or bad defective processing or something, we would have a sampling of pictures. So I did. That's how I worked. I'm not sure how many other photographers did that, but that's the way I traveled.

[00:43:26] And we didn't know back then whether a camera was actually working or not. There's only one disaster that comes to mind. It was on October 10th. I'm not sure the year. I remember the day because it was my birthday in China, in the Three Gorges area of China, where I was having a really good day. I was jumping on little boats, going back and forth across the river, photographing people carrying stuff. And later in the day, it got darker and darker. And there were men loading a little boat with wood.

[00:43:56] And I started turning the shutter speed down slower and slower because I wanted to get a little bit of a motion. And I had it on like a tenth of a second in the camera. I thought, that doesn't sound right. Put it on a quarter of a second. I thought, oh, shit. And then I turned it on a half a second. I put it on one second. But that day, one of my cameras malfunctioned and everything was taken in like a thousandth of a second. So I lost an entire day with one camera.

[00:44:23] Really critical, important shooting on the Yangtze River in the Three Gorges area. But you only went with one camera? No, I had another camera. I was shooting. I usually had two cameras. So I had some of the pictures. But the important camera was I missed all. I lost all that stuff fortunately for one day. And fortunately, it turned out I didn't know at the time how many days I lost. In the end, it turned out it was just that one day. But you don't, you don't, that's one of the beauties of working digital today.

[00:44:52] You can at least make sure your camera's working. We didn't, I didn't know that. In that particular case, I knew I had a bad camera. But normally you don't see your film for weeks or months at a time. And that's a wrap, folks, for part one with my conversation with Bruce Thiel. If there's one thing Bruce's story shows us so far is that you never quite know where curiosity might take you. One National Geographic magazine opened a window to the world for a young boy in Ohio.

[00:45:19] And years later, he was traveling that same world for the magazine, turning good ideas into photographs and leaving enough room for the unexpected to find him along the way. And we are certainly not finished yet. Next week, Bruce, it turns for part two with more remarkable stories behind the photographs, wild encounters, unusual inventions and adventures from around the world. In the meantime, be sure to have a look at Bruce's website and explore more of his remarkable photography. And if you would like to hear some more of the stories behind the images,

[00:45:47] his book Beyond the Lens, Reflections of a National Geographic Photographer, is certainly worth discovering. As always, you can find all the links back in our show notes. Of course, folks, if you enjoyed this episode, have a look at our website. And don't forget to subscribe, leave us a review and follow us on any podcast platform or on YouTube. And make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss part two next week. Until next time, keep shooting and keep on moving your own photography. I see you next week here for part two of this wonderful conversation with Bruce Thiel. Adios!