DEATH SENTENCE!

Text by Bruce Berman

This is a stunning photo essay on “Death Row” in a teenage woman’s prison in Tehran, Iran. The photos are enlightening. The captions are essential and illuminating. Consider the “miracle” of gaining access to the prison by SADEGH SOURI.

Access is everything. Without it…no shoot!

Subject matter is also everything. The stronger it is the more it matters. Being where you don’t belong is inherent to relevant Documentary photography. Yes, you can shoot what you know best and have total access to, but gaining access and operating ion “foreign” territory lends and edge that is visceral. The viewer of these kind of images can feel that.

In a Documentary Photography class, one should ask themself, do I want to do pictures or do I want to know about a subject that I don’t know about and learn more (and make photographs of that)?

This photo essay is an in-depth shoot. What is the difference between this and “Documentary Photography?”

About Author

Bruce Berman

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.”

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