RUNNING DOG

Running Dog, El Paso, November 2023

Text and Photograph by Bruce Berman

I thought I was bringing “the border” into homes that knew it not.
I no longer think that.
I remember an acquaintance, at an exhibition I had, coming up to me after the show and talk and saying, “Now I really know the border and I’ve lived here all my life.”
I was flattered and felt great gratitude. After all, that was my intention in photography, to show and tell what others didn’t see or know.
He then said, I’d buy a photograph, but my wife just couldn’t see one that fit her new color scheme for our living room.
I didn’t know what to say. What could you say?
I understood that when he said he finally “knew the border,” he actually meant he finally could see how he could use what I saw and made for his own needs and wants.
¿Interesante, eh? It’s OK, but I hope for more.
I’ve come to know that most people overlay themselves on the border–maybe on all photography–and for them whatever is there is what is already embedded there, within them, no matter what the image shows.
So be it.
I look for coherence in what is incoherent and hope that someone–anyone–sees what I saw, felt what I felt, but most importantly, comes to know what I know from it.
I have have no expectations.

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UNCANCELLATION

Cancellation #93, Mom’s Kodak film, Chicago, 1950s

I once did an entire series of photographs called “Cancellations.”
It started because one day I was looking at a stack of shipping boxes of my photographs that I had sent to various galleries and museums (pre Internet) that had been summarily rejected. Thanks. No thanks, return to sender. There were a lot of stamps on those heavy boxes. The post office cancellations were ruthless, slashing, colorful. It’s like the post office knew I was unworthy, as well. I half jokingly wondered if the galleries hadn’t done it themselves.
I got lucky here and there, exhibited them for awhile. Dallas. Houston. Cologne, Germany. The art world thought they had found a new star. I knew I was a fraud.

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REMEMBERING LUIS

Luis Jimenez, Hondo, New Mexico, 2001

Born: July 30, 1940, El Paso, TX / Died: June 13, 2006, Hondo, NM

 Read Luis Jimenez’s Bio here.

 

The first time I met Luis, back in the seventies, he came into my apartment and seemed to fill the room. It was like no room was big enough for him.

 He was that big of a g

 Not physically, although he was that powerful.

 Not spiritually, although he did have that aura of somebody who really sees the bigger picture.

He was just big. All of it. Life. Love. Art. Humor. Seriousness. Ambition. Regular guyness.

 When I first met him, and I suspect this is what most people felt upon first encounter, I felt like my life was just a lot more complete than it had been a moment before.

 If you wanted to be good at something, in my case it was to be a photographer- you knew he’d be encouraging for your dream.

He was a brother. A big brother. And like a lot of big brothers, he was larger than anyone could possibly be.

 And, man, was he smart.

 He said what mattered. He lived He cut the crap.

 He made impossibly complex Art and made it look like you could buy it from a south side El Paso Body Shop. And the Art mattered. It was about something. It was about him and our culture and his culture and the idiocy of our system and about the flora and the fauna and intuition and magic and love and joy.

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