Tattoos, Dyer Street, El Paso, Texas, 2019 by Bruce Berman
Dyer Street, El Paso, the epicenter of funk. This is the last place in El Paso that has real texture. Slowly but surely The Grid movies in… Taco Bell… KFC… McDs… Funny, when a photographer shoots aWalmart it’s probably to bemoan it. When a photographer shoots a one-of-a-kind like this tattoo parlor, it’s to appreciate it, revere it. As The Grid crawls into our cities and the ubiquitousness it dulls our eyes, asks to us to desire and consume what is less that good, the spirit pleades for texture and nuance and they beat us on the head with “bland.” I yearn for funk.
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.”
