Avery Danziger Photographs A Desert Catastrophe

When Avery Danziger, 61, a robust, spectacled and voluble fellow, gets a certain gut feeling, he follows it. 

With his camera. 

He has photographed gauzy nudes; guys in drag — some in nuns’ habits drinking whiskey and 7 Up, others in opulent spangles with balloons for breasts; he has photographed robots dancing with his female assistants in the buff; he has photographed street dogs and dog cemeteries with headstones; infantile mummies; classic statuary, landscapes and, in 2012, an abandoned hospital in Wingdale, NY, teeming with decay. 

“I’m drawn to beauty and chaos,” Danziger says. “Very few people try to figure out what my vision is. Most curators want to see the development of a single idea. But from the beginning I have had an obsession to pursue an artistic vision as it appears. When I see something that excites me, I’ll go to the ends of the earth to photograph it.”

His latest object of desire has been a roaring, flaming pit in the Karakum desert near (sort of) Derweze in Turkmenistan, a spot inhabited, sparsely, by nomads and, sometimes, wandering camels.

Inhabitants call it The Gate to Hell.

What appeals to Danziger, here, aside from its forbidding enormity, is the hubris, the impetuosity and the fecklessness of man in dealing with nature.

 In 1971, Soviet geologists were drilling in this desert for natural gas and tapped into a cave filled with it. The rig fell into the pit, 230 feet across and 65 feet deep at the time, releasing a huge stream of natural gas across the landscape. The Soviets figured throwing a grenade into the pit would burn off the gas in a couple of days.

Forty-three years later it’s still burning.

 “There’s no way to treat it,” Danziger says. “You can’t turn off the gas. This is a man-made catastrophe.”

Danziger figured this was his next project. He would need help, though, so he asked his brother, Randy, a 63-year-old heating and air-conditioning contractor in Chapel Hill, NC, to join him.

Randy is a lean, good-natured fellow wearing, when we met, khaki pants and a checked shirt with a pocket protector. His most important job during the four days and nights in the desert would be to hold the rope attached to his brother’s fireproof harness as Avery edged around the friable and unstable rim, photographing into the crater.

“Of course if I fell in, all Randy would pull up was a fireproof harness, but it seemed like a good idea,” Avery said. 

 Randy considered the idea for a day or two. 

Being Avery’s brother has never been pacific. He had a way of inspiring plenty of excitement in the family. Once, during a tremendous thunder and lightning storm in Chapel Hill, where the boys grew up, the family’s housekeeper, Dottie Bobo, pulled out her Bible, praying for deliverance. Avery ventured outside and wiggled his way under a huge fallen tree, waiting for Randy and Dottie Bobo to come looking for him.

The two discovered Avery, arms akimbo, silent, motionless, and, terrified, the two pulled away the giant limb. Avery laughed out loud at his terrific joke, and the housekeeper, badly frightened, smacked him.

Dreading the loss of her job, Dottie Bobo told the boys’ parents what happened.

They gave her a raise.

After a day or two considering the trip, Randy decided he was in. So, Avery, putting everything on a credit card, rented a Canon 5D Mark III digital camera, and a 300 mm lens. And he brought along his 24-mm tilt-shift lens that irons out wide-angle distortions, plus a tripod, clothing for hot days and chill nights and arranged for visas, permissions, a driver, a translator and tickets for the 16-hour flight heading out to what felt like the end of the Earth.

On April 15 this year, Randy and Avery flew to Turkmenistan to camp out for four days and nights in the desert near the flaming pit. It roared steadily, felling birds with its heat, and illuminating the dusty slopes and meager grasses for miles around it.

 Their driver and translator smoked Cuban cigars and made breakfasts of lamb and eggs and coffee and vodka, and the Danzigers slept during the day, waking at nightfall to start work. Once, a man appeared out of the darkness, walking past them in the desert.

Shooting was slow, careful work. Currents of hot air moved across the flames, blurring them, and Avery, watching from the edge of the pit, his camera on a tripod, readied to fire between gusts of heat to get clear images.

“I would have just a second or two to peel off as many shots as I could.”

That way, shooting at up to 1/3,000th of a second he could pick up details in the flames when the heat currents cleared. Then, firing slower, at 1/8th or 1/4th of a second, he revealed an abstract softness in the sweep of the fire on the walls and the fountain of flame below.          

“It was very slow shooting, from one mile away right to the edge. To reach that elemental world,” Danziger said, “the power of the subject has to flow through you.”

And so it did.

He came home to Sharon with 1,800 images, 16 of them, some by day, most by starry desert night, are on exhibit at The White Gallery in Lakeville, CT, through Nov. 16.   

For information, call 860-435-1029 or go to thewhitegalleryart.com.