Border artist Bruce Berman delivers the news "feel"

Bruce Berman (Google profile image)

On my "wish list" of people I've yet to meet is professional photographer Bruce Berman. After beginning his career in Chicago, he has focused  for the past three decades on the border of El Paso/Juarez, living now only three blocks from the international bridge.

Berman, like me (only much earlier in life), relocated to the border. And he fell in love with it, and he hated it, and he still does. "It's complicated," he says, "like any relationship." 


Of all I read and survey--both of and from the border as well as Mexico--his words and images grab me with more frequency than most. In fact he says that The Border Blog, on which he collaborates with web master Manuel Rivera, is not meant to be a news source as much as it is a news feel.


Berman is a professor of journalism at New Mexico State University, specializing in documentary photojournalism. His one-man exhibition at UTEP last year--at which I spent a blissful afternoon--was a prelude to a projected "Border Stories" book. 


I'm preparing to return to Iowa now for the spring and summer, and in the process of sorting through accumulated papers, I discovered the program from Berman's 2010 UTEP exhibit, prompting this post.


The border is filled with amazing people. They are the most compelling reason for my fall/winter return. In the meantime, I will content myself with reading Border Blog. And I hope you will visit it, too.