Picture Perfect

The first time Brynn Bruijn went scuba diving, she slipped and fell off the coral reef.  

“I fell to the bottom, maybe 75 feet or whatever,” she recalls, sitting in her Mount Horeb home, sipping coffee. “At first I was scared to death. Then I saw the wonder of the Red Sea, and I knew I wanted to photograph it. Never again did I want to be without a camera. That’s when I knew I wanted to be a photographer.”

In the years that ensued, Bruijn, her camera, and her uncommon mettle traveled to every corner of the globe. She lived with nomads, fled from wartime bullets and photographed kings and queens, monks and beggars, presidents and even His Holiness the Dalai Lama. She is a Fellow in the Explorers Club of New York,  and she has taken viewers to funerals, family meals, protests and harvests that few others have seen.

“Today, whenever I see some issue on the news, I wish I was there,” she says, her diminutive Shih Tzu prancing around her feet. “That will never go away.”

From photography she learned not just how to make a living with art, but also how to better see the world and share its many secrets with people. She learned that special moments are all around, all the time, from slums to palaces, from mountain peaks to the bottom of the sea.

“The work made me better,” she reflects. “I learned to move less and to see more.”

“Your lifetime experience gives you better vision in the moment,” she continues. “You become gray, not black and white. You learn to be less judgmental and to see most things as relative.”

In many ways, she has lived her life according to a philosophy of photography, on a perpetual journey to lift back the veil of the world and see its chugging heart. 

“With photos, as they say it’s all about light - light and form - but also about taking time to care about what you do,” she says. “Taking time to know what you are doing.”

Bruijn began her career as an underwater photographer in Saudi Arabia, where she contributed to the book, “The Red Sea Coral Reefs.” She then lived in Europe for thirty years and was a regular contributor to magazines including Town & Country, Harper’s Bazaar, Cosmopolitan, Travel & Leisure, Food & Wine, Professional Photography Magazine, Florida Design Magazine, Signature, KLM Airlines in-flight Magazine, Aramco World and National Geographic. 

Her many international projects included Save the Children and UNICEF. Bruijn represented the Netherlands in China, as a guest speaker in the Great Hall, on International Photography. Her work on Shalu Monastery in Tibet became a UNESCO Cultural Project of the Decade, and other images from that assignment appeared in National Geographic magazine. She had a major exposition at the Rijksmuseum voor Volkenkunde in The Netherlands and was later featured in the book, “Tibetan Art: Towards a Definition of Style.”

It all started in Milwaukee, where Bruijn grew up, eventually going to college to study fine art. She eventually got a job in retail, then married her husband, Peter, who was from Holland. The two moved to Europe in the 1960s, in a time when the structural and emotional carnage of the Second World War had not yet faded. 

When they moved into their first apartment in Holland, Peter was called away on business in France. Bruijn didn’t yet speak Dutch, she didn’t even have any furniture, and she was in a completely foreign land. 

“I sat there in the living room and started thinking I would have to either go with it or get out,” she says. “I decided to go with it. You know, bloom where planted.” 

She embraced a life on the move. It would come in handy.

First, the couple soon moved to France. 

“We didn’t have any children yet, we were young lovers,” she says. “It was great. There was nothing I didn’t do in Paris.”

One of the things she did was become enthralled by various photographers whose work was on display in the city’s museums. The images, humanistic, real and taken from the streets, captured her young gaze. 

“I was very taken with them,” she remembers. “I went to all the shows.”

In addition to photography, Bruijn also took an interest in both the culinary arts and interior design, two things that would frequently factor into her pictures in the ensuing years. 

“My editors used to say they would always send me out for one story, and I’d come back with two,” she says. 

After Paris, they headed to Saudi Arabia, Beirut and beyond, sometimes in lands of peace, others in cities of war. At one point, she recalls, as a young mother she found herself facing armed Syrian intruders. “I told them to take anything they wanted, just not to hurt us,” she says. 

At one point, she fled on an airplane that stopped on the tarmac just long enough to jump in.

Eventually returning to the United States, she enrolled at the Milwaukee Center For Photography. She then opened her own studio. Each year, she would journey to New York, carrying three distinct portfolios and looking for work photographing everything from interior design to food to exotic locations. 

“I did get assignments,” she says. “I was nervous as hell, but I did get assignments.”

One of those assignments was for Saudi Aramco, which needed images for a magazine focusing on Islamic culture. 

“He said, ‘Yeah, but you are a woman,’” she recalls of the publisher. “And I said, ‘Yeah, I am a woman. But that makes it easier for me. That makes it harder for them to say no.’”

Bruijn gained unprecedented access for the book “Cuba: Five Hundred Years of Images,” which was sponsored by the Bacardi Family. 

“The Royal Progress of William & Mary,” for the BBC and Dutch Government, was the first of several works of hers on interior photography. 

Her work in the Soviet Union resulted in the book “Uzbekistan.” 

Other books included “Fine Interiors of Naples, Florida” and “Spectacular Homes of Florida and Perspectives on Design.” She is the winner of two Pinnacle Awards for the Best Photographer for Interior Design Magazine Advertising.

One of her most influential subjects was the Dalai Lama. Bruijn first met him in Holland in the 1970s. At the time, he was formulating his plan to spread awareness of Buddhism in the west. 

“I was his photographer when he came to Europe,” she says. “That’s when I asked him what I could do for Tibetan Buddhism.” His answer was that she could photograph historic temples and artifacts in Tibet, which she promptly did with a small team. 

“We camped at night, and rode every day across Tibet,” she says. “We had no papers.”

“I’ve been lucky enough to see and photograph parts of Tibet most people don’t,” she says. 

Bruijn, who by then spoke Dutch, also found work in Indonesia, which was a Dutch colony until 1945. 

“Each assignment was about a month-and-a-half, and it gives you a really good, balanced perspective on life,” she says. 

Her commercial clients included AT&T Europe. ABN Amero Bank, KMPG International, KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, The Rothschilds, Westland/Utrecht Bank and more. 

The most recent of her many museum exhibitions took place in 2010 and shined a light on life in Naples, Florida. “Immokalee, Images of Hope” was a 75-piece exhibit that filled two galleries at the Naples Museum of Art. A book of the same name followed the exposition and won the Gold ADDY award.

Today, Bruijn is finally winding down her career. 

“It was a big career, but it’s over,” she says. She’s currently throwing away old tear sheets from the countless magazines in which her work was featured, and she’s stopping from time to time to take stock of all she saw and did. She is a practicing Buddhist, and she likes gardening, coffee and recounting the many people and places she saw and photographed on her journey here. She still hears the siren call of faraway places, from time to time.

Her home today contains numerous relics from her adventurous life. The walls and shelves are filled with artifacts and artwork from her decades of adventure. A bullet casing here, an ornate sword there, several images of the Buddha, and even a figurine made from the formed and carefully painted ashes of a cremated monk. 

But Bruijn suggests baubles and artifacts are only one part of the human story she tried to tell through pictures.

“I think it’s pretty much the American mindset that if you don’t live in a big showy house or drive a big showy car, you aren’t interesting,” she says. “But I don’t think that’s true; I think what makes you an interesting person is more about who you are and what you do.”

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