Next Generation
"There's not much to tell about this photo," Bruce Dale says. "It's just one-hundredth of a second and be there."
"There" was Appleby, England. It was 1969 and Bruce was beginning a six-month journey to document the lives of Gypsies. He made the photograph with a Nikon F and a 105mm f/2.5 Nikkor. "There's a fair in Appleby each year where the Gypsies gather," Bruce says, "and these kids were fetching water one morning in this little pram they'd borrowed. They've got their little sister in there, and they're pushing it back to their wagons. I had a great time photographing them. One of the kids slipped a giant toad in my camera bag, and later when I reached in to grab a lens, I got a handful of slimy toad."
Bruce's travels with the Gypsies resulted in a Gypsies: Wanderers of the World, published by the National Geographic Society. "According to anthropologists and linguists who've studied Gypsies, they came from India about a thousand years ago," Bruce says. "A good linguist can tell by their dialect which route their ancestors took. If they went south by the Mediterranean and came into Europe that way they'd have picked up a certain word for road; the ones who went north of the Mediterranean through Greece, would have picked up a different word for road. If a Gypsy in Germany used the word 'drom' referring to a road, you'd know his people came from north of the Mediterranean through Greece."
There may not be much to tell about the taking of this photograph, but its significance to the story is another matter. "You have to concentrate on images that best tell the story," Bruce has said, "and decide which photos will stand for more than just the moment…And, of course, these images must stand on their own as good photography. That's what the editorial photographer does—he gets an image that's very important to the story and a photo that's strong on its own."
