D.A. Does Some Hard Time--as Photographer in Siberia

There’s a lot of things Ventura County Dist. Atty. Michael D. Bradbury doesn’t like.

Criminals.

Supervisors who try to cut his budget.

And now comes reindeer meat.

“It tastes like liver,” Bradbury said, shaking his head. “Tough liver.”

But last month, eating reindeer was all in a day’s work for Bradbury. Not the work most people connect him with. His other work.

For nine days going into the Christmas holidays, that happened to be photographer-at-large, running all over Siberia taking pictures of reindeer and Eskimos--about as far from the Ventura County courthouse as a prosecutor can get.

Bradbury says he has wanted to be a photographer for years. Some of his favorite images--a white stallion running free, the jagged side of a rock mountain--hang on the walls of his spacious office in the county Government Center in Ventura.

And the 53-year-old D.A. talks about shooting more pictures once he retires.

“When I finish my career here, I’d like to do a lot more,” he said Friday, recounting his Siberian adventure. “My dream was to have been a combat photographer, but instead I got the quiet existence of a district attorney.”

The fact is, however, that his six-figure pay is a lot better than what most freelance photographers make. So he is just your basic dabbler at the moment.

Anyway, there he was in Siberia just before Christmas, eating Santa’s favorite mode of transportation.

And he wasn’t thrilled about it. But there wasn’t much else to nibble as he traveled broad swaths of frozen tundra, snapping hundreds of pictures of native Nentsy tribes as they followed the herds.

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“Their existence revolves around reindeer,” Bradbury said.

“And if you want to eat, you eat reindeer. But I made sure to avoid the reindeer with the shiny, red nose. I didn’t want a lump of coal in my stocking for the next few years.”

In recent years, Bradbury said, he has taken on commercial jobs in his spare time. A wedding here, a family portrait there.

So when a company asked him to take photos of its properties in Siberia, Bradbury gladly accepted. He arrived in Tarkosale in western Siberia, about 1,500 miles northeast of Moscow, for the start of his trip on Dec. 6.

Each day, he boarded an old Russian military helicopter and headed out for the day’s shoot. He worked fast, Bradbury said, because during the winter, the Siberian day offers only six hours of light.

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One day, when the temperature dipped to 60 degrees below zero, his two electronic cameras froze. And his batteries went kaput.

But he was never down very long because he also brought a camera that operates manually. And he learned to keep his batteries warm, Bradbury said.

The highlight of his trip was talking to the Nentsy people, with the help of an interpreter, and visiting native children at a small school, Bradbury said.

“I got to eat with them and talk to them,” he said. “And the children loved having their picture taken.”

Another day, a group of Russians invited Bradbury to their small apartment in Tarkosale for a simple dinner that included fish and--what else?--reindeer.

The former Communists and their staunch Republican visitor began the evening by discussing politics and ended it by singing old Russian battle songs, Bradbury said.

“I sensed a lot of sadness,” he said. “I think it’s a very dismal experience--out in the middle of this frozen hell--but they certainly make the best of it.”

Bradbury doesn’t know where his next assignment will take him. But if he has his way, it will once again be far from the halls of justice.

“I saved my vacation time for this,” he said. “And you couldn’t put a value on it.”