The musician (musico) is lost in the urban destruction of Juarez, Chihuahua, Mexico in 2015. In those years much of the central city was destroyed neglect and violence.When the Cartel War of 2010-2012 subsided, a large new plan of urban redevelopment began, taking out much of the area south of the Paso del Norte bridge (to the U.S.). Many of the places (bars, brothels) that wandering musicians worked in went away as the buildings went down.
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.”
