American Highway, Culture, Humanity

GHOST

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Ghost, Exit Zero, Anthony, Texas, May 18, 2023

Text and Photograph by Bruce Berman

This is the first photograph I’ve taken in a long time that actually means anything to me.
I’ve been a photographer for fifty-five years. So that’s kind of a sad statement, eh?
I’ve been teaching photography at New Mexico State University for the past seventeen years. It takes its toll.
All the energy I ever put into my own work and the work of the work that allowed me to live off of it gradually but inevitably goes into inspiring others to do what I used to do.
Anyone that teaches can tell you there are some great students that make it all worth it. They’ll probably also tell you there are a plethora of others that didn’t treasure the gift you gave. It’s part of “the biz.” You roll with it.
I do think there comes a time, a rubicon, where your own creative desires become endangered. It’s not just the endless repetition about the mechanics, and the history and the nuances of doing photography, it’s also the endless drivel of academia, the business of being in a university, the committees that mean nothing to me personally, seemingly a bubble of detachment from reality, the occasional obscenity of human behavior, acting so massively vicious because, the stakes are so low. Politics are vicious and low. The feeling of irrelevance can be very high.

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Funk, New Mexico, Night

HATCH

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Tony Roma’s, Hatch, NM (SVNM/Small Village New Mexico Project),
March 2022 by Bruce Berman

Text and photography by Bruce Berman

The SVNM Project is a group documentary project done by the students (and professor) of the photojournalism program in the Journalism and Media Studies Department at the New Mexico State University (NMSU). The project is an ongoing project done over the past ten years.
It is a document of the Rio Grande river valley of southern New Mexico.

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American Highway, New Mexico

Nuts

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Giant Pistachio, Alamogordo, New Mexico, Jan. 2013

CORRECTION:

Just got a very welcome announcement from a Border Blog viewer. He pointed out that the above image is a representation of a pistachio not a pecan.

Correct!

We don’t have much of a defense, but really, when this was posted on April  24, your Border Blog photographer, Bruce Berman, wasn’t much Bruce Berman either. That’s what happens when one “does what one has got to do as opposed to doing what you do.”

We at Border Blog are pleased to announce that the real Bruce Berman is back, on the border, three blocks from the bridge, in his decaying ruin, tape -metaphorically- over his mouth, no longer talking about photography but living his life, and making images that, hopefully, will do, as we wrote almost a decade ago, stating our intention to (see the “About” tab above),  “…cover the news, opinions and culture of the 2000 mile border of Mexico and the United States, concentrating on the epicenter of El Paso and Juarez. The Border Blog is not meant to be a news source as much as it is meant to be a news ‘feel’.”

Thank you MB and thank you Bruce (but tsk tsk on your caption!).

-The Editors

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border photography, Discussion of Documentary Photography, el paso juarez border, Humanity, illegal immigration, Immigration, Juarez, Mexico, Photo of the Week, US/Mexico Border

Crossing the Rio without Confusion

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Undocumented Women CrossingThe R2, Juraez-El Paso, 1984

Text and photograph by Bruce Berman

The river with two names: Rio Grande/Rio Bravo del Norte. Depends where you begin and where you end and where you return to. These women are heading north. It was a long time ago. Everything has changed and nothing has changed and I suspect it will continue to change and not change forever.

The river with two names, the R2, is also the place of the personality with two halves.

Confusing, no?

It is the place of bifurcation. But even that has two sides: twice as much insight.

Where are these women now? Which side happened to them? What happened to me? What happened to Juárez and the U.S.?

What happened to me?

I know this: people will cross going north no matter what and no matter the year. People will cross less, going south, depending on the year.

The river will flow south from Colorado (a Spanish name) to the Gulf of Mexico (an English language name).

And none of it matters to anyone living here except that one government makes it hard for another people to do what they have done for thousands of years and another government makes it necessary.

Who’s confused and who’s doing the confusing?

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border photography, el paso juarez border, New Mexico, Photo of the Week, US/Mexico Border

There Goes Breakfast

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Rooster man of Chaparral, NM – 2008

He has been raising these birds since he was a teenager. Fighters are they, he and his birds.

Now, cockfighting is illegal in New Mexico. Outlawed. “Civility,” has come to the funklands. God help us. Now come the thiefs with pens. They been fighting this since Billy the kid.

The rooster man keeps raising his birds. Doesn’t know what else to do.

He speaks of the “Old Man,” and “Ralph,” “Juan Pedro,”and the others. Each has a name. There are hundreds.

When he speaks, he says their names softly, a Lover’s murmur whispering his loves’ names.

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Art, Chicanismo, Heroes

REMEMBERING LUIS

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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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