Capturing moments

Young Chang

Yana Bridle dropped everything for a cow.

A professional Newport Beach photographer whose clients have included

presidents, actors, princes, governors, senators, prime ministers and

Nobel Prize winners, Bridle threw off her heels, hiked up her slacks and

ran through a meadow of wet grass to freeze forever the image of a calf

being born.

Her just-wed clients stayed behind to continue hosting their Italian

mountainside wedding last year. But Bridle didn’t think twice. Her job

was to photograph and capture the heart of the rural moment. The birth of

a cow in the groom’s barn nearby offered the heartbeat.

Nikon’s Photo Contest International awarded Bridle with an honorable

mention for that photo last month. Her work stood out among 34,187

entries from 73 different countries. The mention is rewarding, she says,

and the contest is one of the largest photographic contests in the world,

but the story of the newlyweds and the countryside and the just “dropped”

cow is what she wants to talk about.

But before she does, let it first be said, Bridle throws off her shoes

and runs. She runs from her dining room to the bedroom to grab something

she needs to show. She rushes from her seat to the stove to refill her

flask-style cup of tea. She flips rapidly through binders bursting with

negatives and photos documenting her lifetime of 58 years.

She speaks bluntly but slowly, struggling for perfect accuracy with

her Czech accent and calling things as they are. What did the barn smell

like? Like a barn, she insists. A barn can only smell like a barn.

The baby cow -- did it have a raw pink underside? How small was it?

“It was like a big dog.”

And trees. She loves trees. So much, in fact, that in a list of her

loves, it’s preceded only by “family,” “eating” and “baking bread.”

Why?

“Because they’re alive.”

She calls her fifth love “being an American.”

Bridle arrived in America almost 32 years ago with her husband Mark

Bridle and son Tom -- daughter Monica, a local kayaking star, wasn’t born

yet. They had escaped Communist Czechoslovakia because the 1968 Russian

invasion blew anyone’s chance of a promising future within the borders,

Mark Bridle said.

So the family left under the auspices of a three-day vacation to

Austria with small bags on their backs and the hope that a country -- any

country -- would accept them.

America did.

The couple was later tried, convicted and sentenced in absentia by

Czech law for criminally escaping. The family never returned during the

old regime and therefore never served time. But the Republic’s government

has since changed, and Yana Bridle visited last year.

“It was very emotional for me to be there because it was so much the

same and so much different,” she said. “It smelled like fresh greenery.

The forest smell was the same.”

Today, after a childhood in which film was so expensive and cameras so

rare that Bridle learned every frame counts, the high-profile

photographer shoots everything from groundbreakings of local landmarks to

portraits of presidential candidates.

Her photo albums are sequential and dated. Steve Forbes autographs his

laughing candid shot: “Yana, thank you for making me look human.”

President George W. Bush repeats a waving pose in one 1996 photo just

like he did for Bridle in the 1980s. Prime minister Itzak Rabin lets her

sit in a room with him alone without a single security figure nearby for

a cozy, natural portrait.

Bridle said she knew she loved photography once she realized its human

touch.

“I knew when I discovered I have the ability to do something unique

for somebody which would last forever,” she said.

And that’s what she did during that fateful Italian wedding. The

daughter of a prominent and wealthy New York couple fell in love with the

son of a poor Italian family who had some cows and some meadows and a

livelihood that depended on both.

“The [boy’s] parents were not even at the reception,” Bridle said.

“The parents were with the cow. That’s why the wedding was not in New

York.”

Vows were exchanged, rings were put on and people were drinking the

champagne. Somebody announced the cow was going to deliver. Bridle

swooped up her cameras and bee-lined for the barn.

“When I came back to the reception, people said, ‘oh you smell,”’

Bridle laughed.

Mark Bridle said he’s impressed that his wife found beauty in an event

so far removed from the festivities and opulence of a wedding.

But then again, when she’s behind a lens, Bridle tends to make

everything a Kodak moment. That’s how her professional career started 33

years ago -- after arriving a session late to a college photography

class, she shot through a roll of film in 15 minutes to catch up with the

other students, who were already developing their film.

“I shot everything around me -- what was inside, outside, everything

on campus,” she said.

The instructor was amazed. He compared her work to that of famed

photographer Richard Avedon. Bridle admits, she didn’t even know who

Richard Avedon was.

All that’s changed today, largely because anyone who’s anyone has

probably been photographed by Bridle and buddied up with her too. You’d

need three days to hear all the stories, she says. And if you don’t

believe them, she’s got the pictures to show.

“I feel it’s my duty to document everything in an event I’m hired to

cover,” Bridle said. “And if it’s a cow, so be it.”