Environmental Apocalypse

Bruce Haley: Environmental Apocalypse
Photographs from the Field

When:  Tues., June 10 – Sun., August 17, 2008
Where: Duncan Gallery
Conversation with the Artist: Fri., June 13, 3:30 pm

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.

Each of the Bruce Haley images included in the current exhibition was photographed following the dissolution of the Soviet Union during the last days of 1991. The majority of these post-communist photographs were taken in Romania, not only of the devastated landscape, but also of the Roma people who wander upon the land as they have done for centuries. In their totality, the photographs comprise a gritty, impressionistic visual diary of an impoverished region. Sometimes shot from the window of a train or bus, or while wandering from place to place, Haley has given us a sense of the aftermath of war and the wreckage of a crumbled empire.

As an artist gifted with a poet’s perception of quiet drama, Haley is drawn towards the world’s margins, places that have endured an ongoing violence carried out against not only humanity but against the natural world. With this dark but poetic vision, Haley’s camera has captured a wasteland of unrelenting harshness along with a sense of the haunting isolation of a destitute rural landscape devoid of redemptive mercy for those who eke out a way of life upon their ancestral spaces. Documenting the decaying industrial infrastructure of countries once shrouded by the Iron Curtain of the long “Cold War,” Haley’s work offers the viewer of his photographs a provocative glimpse of industry’s legacy of pollution.

Since 2000, Haley has traveled through a handful of formerly Soviet-occupied countries documenting the decaying remains of a massive industrial infrastructure. Recording the regional landscapes of Croatia, Azerbaijan, and Romania, Haley’s photographs encompass the vast 3,000 mile-long network of pipelines that are capable of pumping 32 million tons of crude oil and refined petroleum products each year – these are notoriously polluted and poisonous sites. Seepage from this area’s subterranean lake of leaked crude oil measures 4 square miles and is up to 23 feet deep – a toxic lake trapped just above the groundwater table that has ruined farmland, contaminated the water supply, and left a cloud of hydrocarbon vapors that rise from the earth.

Labyrinths filled with scrapped machinery, tangled networks of pipelines and valves, lakes of toxic sludge, or massive structures on the verge of collapse have become the focus of Haley’s camera. Buried within these sites is a narrative of unsustainable and cruelly conceived development based on an ideal of industrial productivity that has been transformed into the reality of abject destruction. Most of these big refineries and factories either have been shut down or are struggling along at a minimal capacity unable to meet even the most lenient of EU environmental protection regulations. They not only represent the failure of Soviet communism to deliver on its promise of a new world free from economic oppression, but also reveal the rise and fall of heavy industry over the last 150 years.

The Northern California freelance writer and photographer Barron Bixler has stated “Haley’s post-communist industrial photographs take the nightmare of history and balance it against the intense purity of photographic form. The net result is a body of work of terrible, irresistible force. Taken individually, the pictures reveal fully self-contained and masterfully composed constellations of texture and visual detail. Taken as a whole, they create a menacing portrait of the depths to which human ingenuity is capable of sinking. Yet despite the heavily loaded nature of his subject matter, Haley’s vision remains steadfastly ambiguous. The images are not explicit indictments of ecological rape and destruction but rather testaments to the photographer’s unswerving curiosity. The feeling evoked by them is not necessarily one of ire or indignation, but rather of awe.”

Bruce Haley began his career by covering Afghanistan’s Mujahideen resistance to Soviet occupation. Since then, Haley has photographed areas of conflict in Asia, Africa, Eastern Europe, and the former Soviet Union. He was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for helping break the story of famine in Somalia. He received the Robert Capa Gold Medal, one of the most prestigious photography awards in the world, for his 1990 coverage of Burma’s bloody ethnic war. Since the birth of his son in 1995, Haley has eased away from the battlefield, exploring instead subjects as diverse as Eastern Europe’s Roma (Gypsies) and the California landscape.