Right There, Navajo Reservation, 1970, by Bruce Berman
This is from a series which is titled Roadside Attractions that I have worked on for 51 years. This was one of my first shoots as I headed west from my base in Chicago. I had been a B/W photographer exclusively until I made this image. There’s just no other way it could be. Ever since then I not only have been attracted to hand painted advertising, but when the hand-painting has become dominant, I look for neew places to be. They’re starting to be more scarce.
Professor Bruce Berman has been a photographer for many decades and a teacher for a few. He started out in Chicago as a street photographer shooting riots for UPI, AP, The Chicago Tribune and the Christian Science Monitor. Mostly interested in photographing people his photography eventually morphed into the idea of doing documentary photography although at the time he didn’t know there was a name for it.
On an assignment, he got lost in the desert and ended up in El Paso and has lived three blocks from Mexico for over forty years.
He has covered the border, northern Mexico, West Texas and the southern United States ever since.
Now concentrating exclusively on documentary photography -and teaching- he has found himself back at his roots.
Teaching at a university has provided Berman with opportunities to do research and work with a new generation of photographers. He calls them “the next great generation of shooters.”
