America, Chicago, Native America

CHICAGO INDIAN VILLAGE

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Carole Warrington and her Menominees. Chicago, 1970 by Bruce Berman

On May 5, 1970, a group of American Indians set up an encampment behind Wrigley Field. Led by Indian activist Mike Chosa, and Menominee Carol Warrington, the Chicago Indian Village (CIV) protested against inadequate housing and social services for Chicago’s 15,000 American Indians. The occupation of Wrigley Field’s parking lot began with CIV’s when a Ms. Warrington was evicted from her Wrigleyville apartment (she refused to pay the rent claiming the apartment was substandard and that the City Housing Authority was not inspecting it and forcing slum landlords to bring it up to code). This eviction led the group to a two-month encampment at a Wrigley Field parking lot.The following summer, Chosa and Worthington led a group of fifty men, women, and children in a two-week occupation of an abandoned parcel of government land, a former Nike missile base,  at Belmont Harbor. Evicted from the site, they took refuge at the Fourth Presbyterian Church.

This action was part the American Indian Movement (AIM), which is still active and is an activist group that fights for Native American rights.

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Documentary Photography, Weather

EVGENIA ARBUGAEVA IN THE RUSSIAN ARCTIC

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Vyacheslav Korotki walks out under a full moon to an abandoned lighthouse

that used to serve the Northern Sea Route, to gather firewood to help heat his home.

Photograph by Evgenia Arbugaeva

 

Evgenia Arbugaeva was born in the town of Tiksi, located in the Russian Arctic. In 2009, she graduated from the International Center of Photography’s Documentary Photography and Photojournalism program in New York and since then works as a freelance photographer. In her personal work she often looks into her homeland—the Arctic, discovering and capturing the remote worlds and people who inhabit them.

Arbugaeva has been a winner of various competitions. She is a recipient of the ICP Infinity Award, Leica Oskar Barnack Award and the Magnum Foundation Emergency Fund Grant. Her work has been exhibited internationally and appeared in such publications as National Geographic, mare, Le Monde, and The New Yorker magazines, among others.

 

 

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America, Culture, Documentary Photography, Urban

THE GRID COMETH: EXURBIA #7

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Exurbia #7. Horizon City, Texas, 2018

 

Text and photograph by Bruce Berman

The Exurbia series concentrates on the landscape that is neither suburban nor urban. It is usually found in the lands just beyond the suburbs, places where individuals and small businesses went, years ago, where the land was cheap and undeveloped. Now The Grid is coming to these places, doing what The Grid does: gobble up the land, erase or sandpaper its textures, oust the one-of-a-kind, make things safe and expected, over-electrified and deadingly dull.

Exurbia is the land that is America today, a place where the suburban cookie cutter machine has come and is bringing the American Dream, which for many is the American Bore.

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Documentary Photography, El Paso, Funklands

THE KEY TO HEAVEN

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San Pedro key, Alameda Street, El Paso, Texas, 2016

El Paso, Texas, 2016

Photograph and text by Bruce Berman

This is about “it” folks.

The last of this barrio, this old ‘hood, known in earlier days as El Pujido (the “push” referencing some knife fights the deteriorating barrio came to be known by in the fifties and sixties).

From the west is coming a vicious storm of hipsterism, of micro brewery culture, restaurants with fuzzy foo foo pinched across the top of, well, some tiny thing underneath.

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