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Rent ur _________?, El Paso, Texas, March 5, 2023 by Bruce Berman
For staff photographers working in the newspaper world, this kind of photo used to be called an “Enterprise Photo,” meaning the photographer, driving around, usually from assignment to assignment would be on the alert for feature photos that his/her editor might use to spice up the next paper’s edition … maybe.
Old habits die hard.
So, here’s today’s enterprise photo.
Moonset El Paso, Dec. 8, 2022, ©Bruce Berman
Rare rain in El Paso, Texas, November 16, 2022
Guy with a smoke, Segundo Barrio, El Paso, Texas, October 2022, ©Bruce Berman
Vaquero with a cigartter, Juárez, México, 1980, ©Bruce Berman
Text/Photograph by Bruce Berman
Lightning may not strike twice in the same place but sometimes it comes close.
In 1980, the day after I returned from an extended stay in NYC, I went to Juárez the next morning and by the time I got to the area of the cathedral, I was pooped. Sat down on a bench. I saw the turquoise wall, lifted the camera and the Vaquero walked by. One snap. Then it was gone.
Today, knees hurting, just voted in the Segundo Barrio for the upcoming 2022 election, I pulled my car over, pondering an upcoming surgery, a little bummed, and at this incredible pink/red wall. There isn’t a lot of color left in la frontera. It’s become a kind of beige/gray landscape.
I went to put my camera from its accustomed place on my lap onto the passenger seat. Just then, from around the corner this guy came cruising through. In a millisecond I told myself I’d miss but in the next millisecond lifted the camera -didn’t even have time to look through the viewfinder.- and plowed ahead. Snap. One shot. No “redo” possible.
And, I just hoped. The monitor of the camera isn’t a really good proof, so I’d have to wait to get to my laptop.
Forty two years later, since the “Vaquero with a Cigarette,” there was a version of same idea. Different times, yes. Waning color, yes. No more vaqueros (haven’t seen any). But here it is again, a repeat, the “Guy with a Smoke.”
A lot has changed but, forty two years later, there’s some things that are almost the same. In fact, we’re still “not in Kansas anymore,” eh?
The lightning came twice.
Baterias Luchador, El Paso, Texas, October 2022
Bus Stop, El Paso, Texas, 2019 by Bruce Berman
I-10 Dog, El Paso, Texas, 2011
TEXT AND PHOTOGRAPH BY BRUCE BERMAN
When I first got to El Paso, I ran into a guy and he told me, “El Paso is just a truck stop on I-10.”
He didn’t mention the desert, the border, the mountains, the river, Juárez, etc.
I’ve lived in El Paso for almost 45 years. It’s all those things I mentioned but, it’s also “… just a truck stop on I-10.”
It’s been fancied up lately. I’ve seen it here, before. Somebody makes out, but the fact is, if you want to be hip there’s hipper places. If you’re hip here, you really aren’t. Sorry.
But this faux hipness, which will inevitably lead to another failure, sandpapers over the very thing that is actually the cool thing about El Paso: it’s not “hip” at all! That’s its charm. That’s not pathetic. That’s genuine.
Mediocre hipness? Not cool. Genuine ruin and authenticity?
Seductive.
That allure is gone from here now. It’s crowded. The border is a mess. The hipsters are stunningly ordinary. The old folks are not of this land. They’re like the new highways, faster, less fun. Generations have passed. People that were of this land, that left, that came back, have now packaged the cultural past and have covered themselves in a cultural identity that is but a fabrication, an identity that was their grandparents, without the sweat and sabrosa.
Development. What a euphemism. [Hit there CONTINUE READING tab, below]
Evil Eye (of Google), El Paso, Texas, 2018
If a dude you don’t know was in front of your casita taking pictures, wouldn’t you go out and ask him/her what they’re doing? Would you not feel righteous indignation (your home is your castle…. why is this cat snapping photos of my castle?)?
Why does Google have a right to drive up and down the streets of this world taking pictures of your home? Who made a law making that alright? Where does this end? Is there an X-Ray camera that can penetrate the outside of your home and looks at your inside? When does that machine get arms and legs and jump down and punishes you -inside or out- for what they think is a “transgression? Is that OK for Google to do? Or the Government? Or your worst enemy? Or the local pervert?
Who is this OK with?
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.
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)
Text and photograph by Bruce Berman
El Paso is in transition. It was always complicated. There was the whole “Southwest” thing and then again, there was the whole Chicanismo thing, and then again there was the cowboy thing, and then again there was a certain ex Pat vibe for 60s and 70s refugees who never went home.
And there was the growing suburban thing, the Ohio is too cold and El Paso is affordable tilt.
Viva complication!
Now El Paso is getting more simple. It is trying to spruce itself up and become a destination. They have a baseball team downtown now, and a restored fancy movie theater within walking distance of it and there are bicycle riders and bicycle lanes everywhere ( a sure sign that the “texture days” are done).
It’s still El Paso but some (real estate developers and those that are young that can’t quite make it out) hunger for it to be Cincinnati. Good luck.
For those who have known El Paso for many decades, to see court jester-dressed bicyclists pedaling through downtown is jarring. It is a pure contrast to the bruised authenticity that has been El Paso’s greatest strength (for me), for those of us who have been hiding here.
