Art, Celebration, Displaced Communities, Documentary Photography, El Paso, Innovation, Photography That Matters, social displacement

PRE ART LANDSCAPE

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Pre Art Landscape, El Paso, Texas, August 2015
Pre Art Landscape, El Paso, Texas, August 2015

 

The Pre Art Landscape is one in which there are images only attractive to some’s intellect that titillates the intellect of others who are over educated, over intellectualized, clean from lack of experience with the world that they choose to not touch and where, through their lack of desire to know a world around them other than the one aforementioned, allows them to revere and praise that which is without interest to anyone but them and their ilk.

So here is an image from my Guggenheim Fellowship submission. I created this less than fifteen minutes ago by walking out the back door of my slum loft (yes there are still some around that the yuppies and Julias haven’t occupied and, therefore, chased out those who were living there, not for some feeble concept of what is cool, but because, previously, they could afford the rent if they were willing to put up with the inconveniences and degradations of everything that the word “slum” implies).

If I hadn’t written this piece I very well may have earned a Guggenheim.

I coulda been a contenda…instead of -let’s face it- a bum…which is a what I am…*

I couldn’t resist the rant.

I suspect that’s what has saved my heart’s soul from an early death.

 

*Thank you Budd Schullberg (http://bit.ly/1KetpPl)

 

 

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African-American, America, Displaced Communities, Documentary Photography, Funklands, Life, Photography That Matters, Photojournalism, social displacement, Street Photography, The Americas, The Human Condition

BRIDGE TO SOMEWHERE

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Bridge to Somewhere, El Paso, Texas. ©2015 Bruce Berman
Bridge to Somewhere, El Paso, Texas. ©2015 Bruce Berman
Text and Words by Bruce Berman

 

The meteorologists call this a “High Pressure system being pushed out by a Low Pressure system.”

Photographers will admit “every once in a while things come together and you get a lucky.”

What do I call it? What does one get for being out there, every evening and every day, always with your “axe (camera)at the ready, often coming home with nothing but the pleasure of having been out there trying?”

The funny thing is, as usual, I was in a part for town I’d never been in before (there are few left). It is a very unusual ‘hood for El Paso. In another city one would call it the “ghetto.” Here, no one thinks there is a ghetto. Being a predominantly latino city (82%), if you have a neighborhood that is lower income, the natural thing is to call it a barrio. This neighborhood was definitely “low income,” and of the three people I conversed with, two had been drinking alcohol to the point of inebriation. It is a mostly Black neighborhood, unusual in El Paso that is only 4% African-American.

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