“Sunder” was released last week. Fifty-five black-and-white photographs depict a people and a landscape in flux. The haunting images, which were taken in various countries throughout the former Soviet Union, show abandoned industrial sites and decaying towns and villages. Children play in bombed-out structures; families toil in rural wastelands. A panoramic photo depicts a young man about to dive into the ocean from the top of a partially sunken warship. A piece of the broken hull pokes out of the water.
It was never easy, and even the oldest of the still-living old-timers will tell you that there never was this so-called “Golden Age” when it was all unicorns and money… and certainly there may be more venues now, online, and it may be easier to self-publish your own book and shove it into the very-limited photo-world pipeline, but who’s looking at this stuff? I guess I should say, who’s buying this stuff? Just the sheer volume is astounding….
Bruce Haley is a self-taught photographer based in Big Sur, California. His images have appeared in numerous books, magazines, and exhibitions. In 1991 he was awarded the Robert Capa Gold Medal for photography. The following images (selected by me) cover a range of years and locations.
Bruce Haley’s book, Sunder, (published by Daylight) is a fascinating and quite poetic take on the demise of the Soviet Union and communism. I see it and am instantly drawn to the landscapes, the combination of complete environmental and industrial devastation mixed with romantic, rural landscapes and economic decay. I’ve been corresponding with Bruce Haley (see interviews here, and here) for a while and he has a fascinating take on photography that includes thoughts on landscape, politics, narrative and process.
He’s currently shooting panoramic landscapes on the history of mining in the US. These are shot on 10 inch negative in an extreme ratio – click on the pictures for more detail as the layers that are revealed are quite amazing.
“The world of Bruce Haley is not for the faint-hearted. Now living in Northern California, Bruce has traveled the globe photographing some of the darkest moments that only the intrepid want to face. “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.”
From 1994 to 2002, Robert Capa Gold Medal recipient Bruce Haley traversed the former Soviet Bloc, photographing war-torn settlements, disfigured industrial sites, and rural landscapes and isolated villages seemingly frozen in time. He combined this disparate subject matter, shot in both 35mm and panoramic formats, in his new monograph, Sunder
Note: I’ve had some people ask me to put this on the website, so here it is… please keep in mind that this was written over a decade ago, so some of it is a bit dated..
B.H.’s Tao of War Photography
subtitled: “Never Ride an Asian Elephant While Wearing Shorts”
