border photography, el paso, el paso juarez border, Love, Texas, Violence on border

I Am Free

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Johnland,  El Paso – June 2009

Been thinking about this guy and borders and the idea of the Big Picture versus the small picture ever since I made it (the photo) this summer, on an almost rainy night, in the northeast section of town, out by the military base.

John Hughes.

Angry. Joyous. Funny. Dangerous. Sweet. Full of love, hate and ambivalence. Boozed up, half mad, half brilliant.

“I am free,” he shouts at the night. “I am free and I am in hell.”

I ask him if he ever goes across the border?

“I am borderless,”he replies, “aren’t you?” He shakes his hand and does a twirl, almost stepping into busy Saturday night traffic.

He does a little dance and steps so close to the edge of the curb that I go to grab him but he spins back onto the sidewalk and does a very theatrical bow. He is a tight rope walker and it looks like he has done this toe dance forever.

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border photography, Discussion of Documentary Photography, el paso juarez border, Juarez, Mexico, Photo of the Week

Dignity In Juarez

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Dignified man #7,  Juarez ©2009 Bruce Berman

Juarez/13 June 2009

So what else is there in Juarez besides murder and catastrophe?

Right now, it doesn’t seem like anything.

But, then, there are those moments.

Tender Mercies.

I walk the streets. I walk the beaten down downtown. I bus through the factory landscape with For Lease signs more plentiful every time. I walk through the night clubs on Avenida Lincoln, defying myself, defying my fear.

But it’s there. The noise comes out of the clubs, loud, but not the joyous sound, more like the power-driven sound of defiance and booze.

People wait for the situation to end. It will. Someday.

Daily, the murder rate climbs, like an upward missile, slicing through the inherent good nature of this state and city, through this sunny northern Mexico metropolis that was turned into, first, a factory for first world consumption and, then,  a monument to the future of world global wage reality.  It was that, just a few years ago.

Seems like an entire epoch ago.

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