Welder at Copperfield Smelter, El Paso, Texas, 2023
Anthony Mendoza works on circular tubing with a Lincoln Arc Welder. He isa contractor working fore the Copperfield Refinery in El Paso, Texas. Mendoza attended the LincolnArc-welding school in Akron, Ohio and did a one year apprenticeship for grace ship builders in Milwaukee.
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.”
