Bruce Dale’s Arlington attic is a capsule of the world. It’s the first place his grandkids always liked to go when they visited, poking through zebra skins, tribal spears and other treasures. There are headlights of railroad steam engines and even pieces of the original Notre Dame Cathedral.
“It’s sort of a museum,” says Dale, a photographer whose career spanning some four decades took him to all corners of the U.S. and more than 80 countries. “I’m a collector. Everywhere I traveled, I always brought back some memories. The nicer things my wife used to keep downstairs, but everything else went in the attic.”
Well, not everything. A photo he took of the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia is on board NASA’s Voyager space craft. His shot of the Rio Grande is a U.S. postage stamp.
Dale, 86, grew up in the Cleveland suburb of Lakewood, Ohio. His aunt and uncle, both photographers, were the ones who inspired him to pick up a camera. “They were always talking about photography,” he says. By the time he graduated from high school in 1956, he had 50 photos published in Cleveland newspapers and had landed a job as a photographer for the Toledo Blade.
Work became his compass. College was secondary as he hopped around the country. “I spent all of my vacation time attending various universities,” he says, recalling how he picked up classes here and there—including at the University of Miami, University of Missouri and Syracuse.
He was still working at the Blade when he met his wife, Joyce. Her aunt was the newspaper’s cafeteria manager and introduced them. Joyce had a boyfriend at the time, but Dale says he ultimately won her over, sending gifts—a goldfish, flowers, candy, a singing telegram. They married in June 1961 and eventually had three sons.
They moved to the D.C. area in 1964 when Dale landed a job as a staff photographer for National Geographic.
“I thought it would be only for a couple of years, but I wound up staying 30,” he says. “It was a very, very exciting job. A lot of photographers specialize. I kind of did a little bit of everything. I did some underwater photography, some high-altitude pictures, a lot of science and anthropological pictures.”
He made 10 trips to China and learned to speak Mandarin. He photographed American mountain communities in the Ozarks, Rockies, Sierras and Appalachia. He studied the feeding habits of bats and road runners.
When he wasn’t away on assignment, he fixed up the 1938 house he and Joyce bought in Tara-Leeway Heights. He installed flooring and electrical wiring, constructed his own cabinets and built entire additions, doubling the home’s size to accommodate their growing family.
He was resourceful and handy at work, too. To create one of his most celebrated photographs, Dale mounted cameras on the tail of a jumbo jet to capture the aircraft landing at night.
“I was in the cockpit, pushing the trigger with a wire that tripped the camera,” he explains, “but then the wire broke, so I had to relay to a man sitting in the tail when to take the picture. All the runway lights kind of swirl up. It turned out to be a spectacular shot.”
As with most of his favorite photos, the process was an experiment, the result somewhat unplanned: “It was serendipitous. It was a discovery.”
For years, Dale displayed only one of his own images at home—a snowy landscape shot taken from the window of a cabin in Maine where explorer John Wesley Powell died in 1902. He was working on a biography of Powell’s life, retracing the geologist’s 1869 expedition down the Colorado River, when he stumbled upon a museum claiming to have Powell’s deathbed in its collection. “I thought, ‘I wonder how they got that.’”
The museum’s curator referred Dale to the donor of the artifact, who then put him in touch with the new owners of the cabin where Powell spent his final days. Dale arrived in a snowstorm, got stuck and had to walk the last quarter mile to the house.
His first thought was to photograph the cabin from the outside, but the view of the wintry landscape from inside proved more interesting. “I took this picture with the camera actually pressed up against the window looking out,” he says. “It’s more of a still life. You have to look at it twice to realize it’s not a painting. It’s a little more abstract. I’ve always liked the feeling of it. People look at it and see a lot of different meanings in it.”
In 1994, he took a buyout and retired from National Geographic. In the years that followed, he taught digital photography workshops in New Mexico and shot ad campaigns for major corporations and apparel companies.
Dale was 73 when he was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2011. He had surgery to remove the mass, but the cancer came back with a bleak prognosis: Doctors said he had a 10% chance of survival. He said his goodbyes and got his affairs in order.
Then he learned about a new kind of targeted radiation therapy being pioneered in a handful of hospitals nationwide. One of them was Virginia Hospital Center (now VHC Health), an eight-minute walk from his home. He went for treatment four times a week for four months.
On the last day of his cancer treatment, Joyce went for a checkup and was diagnosed with stage 4 ovarian cancer. At that point, Dale says, he’d come to terms with his own diagnosis. But his wife’s was devastating.
“Man, that hurt,” he says. “It was like getting hit with a sledgehammer.”
Joyce underwent surgery and they had a “really great year,” he remembers. They traveled to Hawaii and were preparing to fly to Germany where she could receive a new treatment, but she became too sick to travel. She died in December 2015.
In her obituary, she was remembered as “a musician, gardener, chef, stylist, photographer, navigator, bookkeeper, researcher, publisher, camper, and best friend.”
Since then, Dale has found love again. Veronica Morrison, his live-in partner and travel companion, is a former graphic designer for National Geographic. “She lost her husband the year after Joyce,” he says. “She came over one time five years ago—and she hasn’t left.”
He hasn’t exactly retired. For one of his latest projects, Return to Roma, Dale is revisiting the people in photos he took 50 years ago for a book called Gypsies: Wanderers of the World.
His cancer is in remission. He has no plan to stop working. “I enjoy it. I find it challenging and stimulating,” he says.
Another project in the works, a children’s picture book called Grandpa’s Attic, pairs photos from his travels with the stories behind them. One shot captures a parka-clad Dale covered in ice in the Arctic circle.
“This is Grandpa working at 50 below zero,” he says animatedly, captioning the image. “It was so cold that if you spit, it would freeze before it hit the ground. It would bounce and bounce. And if you’re lucky at night, the sky will light up like a beautiful colored curtain. It’s called the northern lights or the aurora borealis.”
A photo of an object resembling a pie plate, he explains, is actually a pan used for finding gold. Dale was on a father-son trip with his son Christopher (then age 6) in the Sierra Madre Mountains when they met an old-time gold miner and camped with him for several days, learning his technique. In return, they forked over the gold they found and promised not to reveal the treasure hunter’s secret location.
“The whole book is like that,” Dale says. “It’s a work in progress. I still have half of the attic to go through.”
Wendy Kantor is an award-winning journalist based in Northern Virginia. She can’t wait to read Bruce Dale’s new book to her kids.