Dust Surrender in El Segundo, April 20215

The Dust Storms of 2025 in West Texas (El Paso), New Mexico and Chihuahua will not soon be forgotten.
In fact I made sure of it for me by producing a book about them and about THE Dust Bowl for good measure.
The book is informative and fun and honor’s a great woman –my mom– who lived through it am shared her stories.
Check it out at Amazon: https://shorturl.at/KXIHu

The Royal Host, Las Cruces, New Mexico, January 2026 by Bruce Berman (Preservation Trail)

Ain’t much left.
I’m gonna save whatever is left.
You can have the rest.

The HISTORY OF DUST book is out. Available on Amazon as of now.
The book explores two different major dust seasons, both record-setting: The 1930’s Dust Bowl and the 2025 tri-state Great Dust Storm, that enveloped New Mexico, West Texas and Chihuahua.
The book features the photography of Bruce Berman (2025) and the 1930’s FSA (Farm Security Administration) photographers of the Dust Bowl, including Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, Jack Delano and others. With quotes and narrative the book show the similarity of the storms but points out the differences as well.

Dad Cab, El Paso, Texas, March 2025

Text and Photo by Bruce Berman

For sure, one of the things I like about El Paso, the Border and maybe the culture of the Southwest, is the prevalence of family.
It’s the foundation of that city. Over 80% Latino, it’s a natural outgrowth of that culture.
Here, on a busy street (Hawkins Boulevard), Dad happily gives his niña a ride. From when I first noticed him until he turned a corner I could not, he had walked over a mile!
This wasn’t funzy... it was required transportation.
Dad Cab.
Probably one of the memorable rides of her life.

20s car in La Mesa, New Mexico, Photograph by Bruce Berman

Southside El Paso, February 27, 2024

Text and Photograph by Bruce Berman

Dodged the bullet again. Well, this time there is no ‘explainin’ it so it’s fair to say, a hand deflected the fatal bullet.
Another chance.
Haven’t been doing photography much–for myself–in recent years. Been teaching. 34 semesters and most days in between spent on working at it. Caught up with me. Every word that went out came out of somewhere, somewhere where ghosts dance, that place deep inside where who we are actually lives. I built that up for years. Can one afford to let it go, driveled out in a million repetitions? And, for what? On February 12 a bomb exploded in my chest during my first class of the day. I taught my way through the whole class while The Reaper toyed with me, as God stood by and watched me gamble. Idiot! Why would I think God would intervene for a fool?
It wasn’t my time it turns out. Not now. Not yet. Why? All the right pieces fell together on the timeline, miraculous people showed up, the traffic parted ways for Mary’s defacto EMS Hyundai, and colleague Darren, always quiet, protecting his genius, appeared. Navy man. He all but carried me to the car then went into the building and with the precision of a true leader, with his cellphone, assembled the “troops,” at the nearby hospital, the cardiac team. Mary battled noon traffic. I was in and out, almost gone. We got there and Dr. Miracle, Abdul, his Rock ‘n Roll med team, waiting, like a great band about to play the once in a lifetime anthem; Lights Out.

I died twice. They brought me back, twice.
Here I am.
Now I walk away from my job of 17 years. I have turned off the noise so I can hear what is peripheral. Today I am 17 days old.
I am new. I am old. With many hands and hearts holding me, knowing it was even bigger hands that would decide this day, I am here.
Today–17 days latter–my doctor parted our meeting with this: “You have a second chance. Go and do something good.”

This is the 1st photograph of my 3rd life (there has been two other near misses, none as near as this). I shot it yesterday.
Hello again.
I did it for me.
I will never talk about this image–or any others–again. Medicine comes in many guises. Don’t dilute your cure. I have a lot of reseeding to do. I think whatever days we have should be used adding to our “book,” or at least gaining back what we flittered away.
I start again. Another chance.
I am 17 days old today.

Running Dog, El Paso, November 2023

Text and Photograph by Bruce Berman

I thought I was bringing “the border” into homes that knew it not.
I no longer think that.
I remember an acquaintance, at an exhibition I had, coming up to me after the show and talk and saying, “Now I really know the border and I’ve lived here all my life.”
I was flattered and felt great gratitude. After all, that was my intention in photography, to show and tell what others didn’t see or know.
He then said, I’d buy a photograph, but my wife just couldn’t see one that fit her new color scheme for our living room.
I didn’t know what to say. What could you say?
I understood that when he said he finally “knew the border,” he actually meant he finally could see how he could use what I saw and made for his own needs and wants.
¿Interesante, eh? It’s OK, but I hope for more.
I’ve come to know that most people overlay themselves on the border–maybe on all photography–and for them whatever is there is what is already embedded there, within them, no matter what the image shows.
So be it.
I look for coherence in what is incoherent and hope that someone–anyone–sees what I saw, felt what I felt, but most importantly, comes to know what I know from it.
I have have no expectations.

3rd Street, OKC, 1974

Text and photograph by Bruce Berman

Good ole days… when every inch wasn’t being developed.
Period.

Smoking Man, diner at State and Ohio Streets, Chicago, 1971

Photograph and Text by Bruce Berman

This was the very beginning of my career, when I first realized what I wanted to be … a photographer. Not much has changed since then. This is exactly the kind of photograph I like to make, the kind of experience I like to have. Me on the prowl, encountering a person on the fringe, direct eye contact. The only thing I do now that I did not do then is to get more info about a person, really get to know them. At that time, and for many many years afterwards, I was just satisfied with getting the photograph. As time has gone on I now realize that that is incomplete. It’s the photograph and the text that matter, so that the person photographed is honored, not just used. Maybe that reflects aging, learning the world is not all about me but about me being in the world, about respect for others, maybe just about being a real documentary photographer.
So, here I am, 42 years later and I don’t know who he is, where he was from, what the name of the diner was, what he did for a living, exactly when the date was, etc., i.e., the 5Ws that any journalist knows are essential.
A detail I never noticed before, is his shoes. Believe it or not they are meaningful to me. In my old south side neighborhood, these are the kind of shoes we’d buy every few years. They were our main shoes (except for dress shoes). These were the “better ones,” because they have finished leather. Ours were the exact same 10 lace model but a cheaper brand, and the leather on those was called “rough out.”
Why am I talking about shoes? 

These were inexpensive boots. In the steel mill area shopping center at 91st and Commercial Blvd., these were “worker’s shoes.”
These were what some kids at our grammar school derogatorily called Polish gym shoes. Indeed, because they had cork soles, we were allowed to wear them for our mandatory phys. ed. classes, thus the nickname. They didn’t mark up the gym’s maple floors at Horace Mann Elementary School.  
These were fighting words if said by someone who was not from our group. Amongst us, that’s what we called them as well. Whoa be it to those who called them that who wasn’t from our group. Insult or noun, it depended where your family was coming from. The words, “Polish gym shoes,” implied your parents didn’t have enough money to buy a second pair of shoes, i.e., regular Converse type real gym shoes, and that your shoes were doing double duty. The majority of us were mostly from either Eastern Europe, Mexico or Ireland, many of the parents being first generation and working in the trades. The reason many of us wore Polish gym shoes, was that they were cheap. In that era, that Cold War era a lot of people in the neighborhood were refugees from Communism, mostly Eastern Europeans, Poles, Estonians, Lithuanian, etc. Many hand no English, few had any extra money.
There were more than one, ah… scuffles … over those words, Polish gym shoes. A silly thing to fight over, I suppose, but at the time it was sort of a fight that seemed noble, honorable even. 
So, back to the photograph of this man, sitting in the diner, at the corner of State and Ohio Street on the near north side of Chicago, in the more, ah, urbane Chicago, there was a intuitive reason I chose this guy to photograph (and in those days, well, actually, still now) I found it very hard to approach people and ask to make a photo. If I had noticed this detail, this man, whose name I do not know, who helped me to begin my life as a photographer, I would have realized he was a “brother” of sorts. We both were wearers of Polish gym shoes.
Had I noticed this detail when I was shooting this it would have been a great opening gambit for me to lower that barrier that always exists between intruding photographer and wary subject. Maybe I would have asked his name, tried to know more about him, which I have come to know is the real reason and purpose I want to make photographs of people I don’t know and will probably never see again. I guess that would be called professionalism. That would come later.
The smoking man and I shared a common bond. We both knew–and wore–Polish gym shoes, and, I’m sure, were proud of it!

Ghost, Exit Zero, Anthony, Texas, May 18, 2023

Text and Photograph by Bruce Berman

This is the first photograph I’ve taken in a long time that actually means anything to me.
I’ve been a photographer for fifty-five years. So that’s kind of a sad statement, eh?
I’ve been teaching photography at New Mexico State University for the past seventeen years. It takes its toll.
All the energy I ever put into my own work and the work of the work that allowed me to live off of it gradually but inevitably goes into inspiring others to do what I used to do.
Anyone that teaches can tell you there are some great students that make it all worth it. They’ll probably also tell you there are a plethora of others that didn’t treasure the gift you gave. It’s part of “the biz.” You roll with it.
I do think there comes a time, a rubicon, where your own creative desires become endangered. It’s not just the endless repetition about the mechanics, and the history and the nuances of doing photography, it’s also the endless drivel of academia, the business of being in a university, the committees that mean nothing to me personally, seemingly a bubble of detachment from reality, the occasional obscenity of human behavior, acting so massively vicious because, the stakes are so low. Politics are vicious and low. The feeling of irrelevance can be very high.

I was coming home last night, from my absolute last obligation of the academic year (finishing a very fine book that has the photographs of my students who did a documentary project, The Small Village New Mexico project: https://amzn.to/3WmEqaJ). I stopped for tomatoes at the Food King that is at Exit Zero along I-10, that exit being the transition line between southern New Mexico and Texas (and El Paso, where I live).
While I was in the cashier line, a little man, sunburned, with a wild beard and an American flag bandana came in the front door, rushed into the store, disappeared for a moment or two, then came up to the line and asked, urgently, “Does anyone know where there’s a liquor store?”
I shrugged. So did everyone else. Some looked alarmed. But, no one did know.
Jonesing. I remember. It’s been 35 years.
He rushed out of the store, definitely a man on a mission. I was a little amused. I appreciate anyone that’s that focused and intent. I’ve been there, long ago.
When I got to my car in the parking lot and started to pull out to return to the Interstate, I saw this guy sitting on a bench, 20 yards from the store. He looked stranded, isolated, surrounded by a an enormous blacktop parking lot, a tragic figure, alone in the fading light as evening approached. The light was getting low, red, evening was coming, and there he was, the old limping guy, obviously short of his need for his booze.
There was just something purely human about him. Sad. Sweet. Vulnerable. He needed help.
I rolled past him and offered, “I think there’s probably a liquor store in town (pointing west to Anthony, New Mexico).”
“How far?” he asked.
“About eight blocks.”
I saw him deflate. That said it all. I had noticed he didn’t walk well, shuffling, little sliding steps, seemingly neither foot ever leaving the ground. His face showed that he knew he couldn’t make eight blocks and back. I appreciate that. I have a mobility issue of my own. Can’t go more than a half block.
He was a small guy. Maybe 5’4,” and he looked even smaller after that exchange.
“Any chance you could give me a ride,” he asked? There was something nice in his voice. Decent. He didn’t seem like a wild guy at all, just a guy who needed something. He shared he needed some alcohol so he ” … could sleep, tonight. It’s hard and cold on the ground,” he said.
Sure. Why not. And, I kind of knew there was an unseen hand in this encounter.
He got in. He had one backpack and a sleeping bag. He smelled of the road and too many days away from the amenities. But not too bad. It was OK. We went into town. He was quiet, he kept saying “thank you.” Thankful. Who knows how we really communicate with another person, but somehow I knew this meeting was supposed to happen and I was meant to meet him. This was a script unfolding and I was going with it. There was a reason for this meet up, somehow.
Right away, not a half block away, we saw a Walgreen’s. His eyes lit up. I was thinking, “Phew, this is gonna be easy, I need to get back on the highway.
He went in and came out within a few minutes. Turned out, they didn’t sell liquor, but had told him there were, indeed, a some liquor stores in town that did sold liquor.
Off we went.
We got into town and after a few blocks we passed a sign on a storefront that said “beverages.” I cracked a U and pulled up and he went in.
Nope. But they told him there was a Circle K, “just up the road.”
About three miles later we got there. He went in, took some time. For some reason I felt celebratory. Happy for him. For booze? No, not really, but for him finding what he needed. The light was beautiful, pure New Mexico “sweet light,” low and golden, melding into the dark fields and the coming night. It was now sundown, and darkness was settling in.
He came shuffling back to the car and I could see a pint bottle sticking out of his coat pocket. He leaned over to get in the car and the bottle started slipping out of his front pocket. I reacted, slapped his chest to hold the bottle in his pocket, to stop the slide. For a moment I saw fear, just for a second, then gratitude. I’d saved the day!
I liked this guy.
We drove around, the sunset nice and kind, our conversation turned personal, he talked about the Bible and God and Jesus and what we had both done and not done in life, pondered what we needed to do now. He said he keeps asking God what to do and he could never get an answer. I said I understood and have asked the same thing. I shared that I had heard you should ask Him what would please Him for you to do. I looked over at my passenger. He had tears in his eyes.
“Did I say something wrong,” I asked.
“NO!” He slapped his knee. “You said something I never thought to say. That’s the key! I’ll never forget this. Thank you.”
He meant it.
Do you believe in magic? Destiny? A Plan?
How can you not?
We drove back to the highway. He asked to be dropped off at the Pilot store/gas station.
“I need to find a place to sleep tonight,” he said and I could see he was surveying the land behind the Pilot. “I know I’ll sleep better tonight,” he offered, “thanks to you.”
I smiled. Hey, glad to help.
We’d become friends and I knew, like any parting with a friend, it was going to be a bittersweet moment.
I always have a camera. Always. It’s a habit that all photographers acquire. Can’t grab moments if you don’t have your tools. I don’t use it much these days. I talk for a living. I encourage for a living. Every week I talk about f-stops and light and commitment and photographers and on and on. I have had a long career. I have lots of photographs and, now books of my photographs. But somehow it’s become hard to make more images. Just being alive is precious now and the need to keep gathering photographs doesn’t make me any less grateful for the moments I encounter. I find myself, in a world where everyone is a photographer and particularly in my world of “everyone is a photographer,” i.e., students of mine. I search for the meaning of why to do it anymore. It feels like I’ve given it away. It’s not really my profession anymore, right? I’m no famous guy. I’ve passed the torch to a few generations now, right?
However, this moment was different. I knew, at this moment, the logjam had to end. I needed to make a photograph of this man. We’d shared hearts and I knew I’d never see him again. I guess that basic instinct is what everyone has and every person with a cellphone has galleries full of photographs of those they love, those they know, moments they’ve experienced.
Maybe, just maybe, that primal reason for using photography is what’s been missing for me. That reason to remember, to note, to save, to be able to remember, to even leave behind your memory. I’m thinking, that’s why I started in this way back n the 1960s.
I had helped him get his hooch. He helped me get back my soul.
Deal!
His name is Bob but he said he hadn’t been called that in years.
“They call me “Ghost,’ ever since ‘Nam.”
He’d been in the Army, 101st Airborne, in 1965. He started drinking hard, then. He’s quit a few times and says he won’t give up on that idea. “I’ll try again.”
As we parted, he insisted, “I’m not homeless! I have a house back home, in Fort Collins (Colorado). I’m trying to get back there,” he said with some vigor, establishing something important to him.
He was trying to get there, but something happened with his ticket and he had to get off the bus in El Paso (50 miles to the south). “They dumped me off the Greyhound in El Paso. Stole my $279.” “
For the first time in a very long time, I needed the act -interact?- of making a photograph and I wanted it to be good. My best have been. Lately I’ve been shooting nothing like that, nothing that was important, things, places, but not humans. I knew this was my moment; never make photos again or make photos that matter (at least to me).
It’s not the first time I’ve come to that crossroad. In fact, it is a road well traveled, a commitment that has been continually renewed.
I asked to take his picture.
It’s been a long time since I asked anyone that. I remember the first time, in an alley in Chicago, in the rain, 55 years ago. Full circle.
I dug my camera out of the back seat. It was nighttime now. We walked (shuffled) over to the side of the Pilot store.
“Bad light,” he observed, as we stood in the night, the only light source from an overhead mercury vapor coming off the overhang of the Pilot building.
“Doesn’t matter,’ I replied, “I just need to have this memory.”
“Oh, like a snapshot,” he observed.
Exactly.

Border fence, El Paso, Texas/Juárez, Chihuahua, November 2022 by ©Bruce Berman