| Dates: | 1957, 16 January - | | Born: | US, CA, Alameda | | Active: | Global |
Bruce Haley is the recipient of the Robert Capa Gold Medal, one of the most prestigious photography awards in the world. Haley received this honor for his 1990 coverage of Burma‘s bloody ethnic civil war.
This self-taught photographer with a military and police background began his career in 1988, covering Afghanistan‘s mujahideen resistance to Soviet occupation; shortly thereafter the legendary Howard Chapnick accepted Haley into Black Star, one of the industry‘s premiere photo agencies. With a primary focus upon war and its aftermath, Haley photographed areas of conflict in Asia, Africa, Europe and the former Soviet Union. His images (from Burma) of a grisly execution by stabbing shocked the world and engendered much controversy and discussion. He was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize by the Baltimore Sun in 1992, for helping to break the story of the famine in Somalia. Since the birth of his son, Haley has eased away from the battlefield, exploring subjects as diverse as the Bolivian altiplano, Eastern Europe‘s persecuted Roma (Gypsies), and the decaying infrastructure of Soviet-era industry.
Haley‘s photographs have appeared in books, magazines and newspapers worldwide, as well as in corporate publications and on CD, video and DVD covers; a list of his clients would include Time, Life, U.S. News and World Report, The London Sunday Times Magazine, Stern, GEO, Aperture, Georgia-Pacific and the Chevron Corporation. Numerous magazines and newspapers have profiled Haley and his work, among them American PHOTO, (French) PHOTO and B&W. His limited-edition portfolio, entitled 13 Million Tons of Pig Iron, was #1 on the Photo-Eye Bestseller List. Haley‘s exhibition prints have hung worldwide, under the auspices of such disparate entities as the Ansel Adams Gallery, the Visa pour l‘Image in Perpignan, Photo Americas, the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography and the United Nations.
Artist statement:
"If there is a single thread that runs through the disparate images in this exhibition (other than the purposely-vague post-communism theme), that thread is a personal one: the fact that I wander toward the world‘s margins, the dark places, places of solitude, rural landscapes, wasteland. What this says about me is unimportant; what one encounters in such places is the heart of the matter. For it is there that life is unvarnished and vital, where the margins offer the occasional glimpse of a darkly-splendid world. The inhabitants of these places should not be romanticized, nor should they be considered poster-children for world debt-relief programs and charity organizations. They are (or were) living, breathing individuals, facing their particular problems with courage, with anger, with kindness, with alcohol, with faith, with hope.......... They have welcomed me, they have taught me much, and I thank them."
Additional thought
As for philosophy, I would have to steal from the poet Yevtushenko and say that a life in photography is "a choice that has no mercy, but is surely redemption."
(June 2006)Preparing biographies
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