This assignment was designed as a Warm Up Exercise for the Documentary Photography class at New Mexico State University/Dept. of Journalism/Mass Communication. It’s goals were multiple: Get comfortable with photographing strangers, finding “sources,” realizing that one person’s “odd” is another person’s “normal (and vice versa!), working with focus and shutter and light to achieve strong portraiture.
The assignment requires courage on the part of the photographer, a trust in photography to reveal truth and a commitment to the class objective of:
“Use photography as an instrument of education -not self expression- so your work can matter in our society.”
You, the viewer, will be the judge if that goal was achieved.
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.”
