D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
July
2008
Photographer Michael Berman
Page: 2Berman, whom Bowden describes as "some kind of dervish, with. . . a restlessness flowing," believes too often our perceptions of a given place are preconditioned, locked by a rigid set of stereotypes and judgments. Deserts, typically, are given short shrift. We expect them to hold little of value, yet all landscapes are precious and unfathomable. If nothing else, their components are modified or destroyed at our future peril.
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"Janos Grassland, Chihuahua." (copyright, Michael Berman) |
"To his art," a curator once wrote, "Berman brings an awareness of the complexity of the biological worlds; to the political and social dialogue of the rural West he brings his art as a catalyst to renew and heighten our perception of the land."
Linda Brewer, whose Blue Dome Gallery exhibits Berman's work in Silver City, reports those who buy his photographs often say "they find something new in them all the time. As an example, there may be similar shapes and patterns repeated in the landscape over and over again. They don't necessarily see this at first. Also, for many who contemplate it, Michael's art is about journeys." Brewer considers Berman's images to be "beautifully crafted and well thought out, with great depth of field. He's a master at what he does."
Getting his four-by-five-inch view camera, constantly-chilled negative stock and bulky film loaders to remote locations is not easy. Yet Berman downplays the physical and political challenges the Chihuahuan presents, particularly for a gringo who speaks limited Spanish and travels alone and afoot. Because virtually all land on the Mexican side is occupied in some way, he usually secures permission from landowners before heading out to take pictures. This is prudent in light of continued violence involving drug cartels and smugglers. Scores of narcotics-related murders and kidnappings have occurred this year in the states of Chihuahua and Sonora alone.
| Silver City's Blue Dome Gallery, 307 N. Texas St., will
host "Premonitions," a new exhibition of Michael Berman's work, from Sept.
20 to Nov. 17. The artist will be present at the opening on Sept. 20
from 4 to 7 p.m. Berman will lead a pair of six-hour workshops this fall in association with the annual Gila River Festival. A landscape photography session is slated for Sept. 20, with a class on use of view cameras held the next day. Information about this low-cost opportunity for local residents to work with Berman, formerly a teacher at WNMU, is available from the Upper Gila Watershed Alliance at 535-2519 or ugwa.org Michael Berman's website: www.fragmentedimages.com |
"When people say don't go somewhere," explains Berman, "you don't go." Caution and luck have served him well. Rarely has he found himself "in the wrong place at the wrong time." For the most part, he says, rural residents are welcoming and friendly.
Berman's quest yields images that run the gamut. Here are canyons scoured to bedrock by flash floods, native plants arrayed in unusual patterns dictated by circumstance, ancient sea floors weathered by the elements, and the tracks of animals — including people — left in sandy arroyos. Occasionally, human artifacts are revealed: a discarded bombshell, a rickety windmill, a concrete monument marking the international boundary. They all contribute to the bigger story written in this desert.
"Art used to deal with symbolic language and issues that were bigger than both the artist and the art," says Berman, leaning forward across a long wooden table. We are seated in a high-ceiling room of his studio, surrounded by framed gelatin silver prints and the detritus of a modern-day explorer. A dusty backpack leans against a table, a pair of worn boots languishes in a doorway. "You look at the arts right now," he continues, "and a lot of it is the sort of one-liner that is pretty easy to understand and market. I think the more intriguing thing is to do something larger than yourself."
It's tempting to compare Berman's photographs with those of Edward Weston, Eliot Porter and Ansel Adams, whose large-format panoramas helped put places like Yosemite Valley, the Grand Canyon and Big Sur on the tourist map. But while it shares the arresting power of unsullied natural vistas, Berman's work points to something different. Where his predecessors won quick resonance with viewers by presenting dramatic scenery that fit an agreed-upon aesthetic, the New Mexico photographer shows us a kind of feral, minimalist and deconstructed wildness that may disturb more than it comforts.
Photographers such as Ansel Adams "left out the most ecologically significant landscapes," wrote Berman in his Guggenheim application: "the landscapes that connected things." His forthcoming photos "will be used to bring together communities that care about the future of these [desert] lands and offer the larger culture a vision of the complexity of a living system."
Such motivations are nothing new for Berman. In 1998 he was one of three founding board members of Silver City's Gila Resources Information Project (GRIP) and continues to serve on that board. The nonprofit group has challenged longstanding mining practices and engaged in actions aimed at preserving threatened resources. "We became a voice that was significant," Berman recalls, noting that few spoke in defense of local ecology 20 years ago. With the emergence of GRIP, antagonists "could no longer say, 'Those [environmentalists] are people from the outside,' because we lived here, too." Today, he feels, there is growing regional awareness that residents of all persuasions must work together to reach a workable consensus on resource management. "How we allow our landscape to have some integrity as a natural system is really the larger question for everyone."
Besides the desert, Berman is drawn to the Gila River watershed, and he makes extended treks there as time allows. "The Gila is one of the more unique places on the planet," he believes, "and one of its healthiest ecosystems." The forest and river are "in an amazing recovery cycle that you don't see anywhere else. [But] I rarely manage to do photographs there because I'd personally rather go hiking and look at stuff."
Allyson Siwik, GRIP's executive director, praises Berman for "bridging the gaps between art, conservation and the environment. He's very good at what he does." She speculates that his activism may have cost him sales and commissions in the months following GRIP's founding, when the organization was attacked by some for its hard-line stance.
But things have changed. Individuals and corporations have become somewhat more accountable and open to new ideas. For Berman, that's a hopeful development. He believes artistic expression may be one way that he — and the rest of us — can escape the inevitable "tracked" thinking that inhibits us from saving locales whose preservation is crucial, yet that don't automatically provoke an ecstatic response.
Our fast-disappearing desert grasslands, he points out, have played a key role in the survival of native plants and animals that either lived among them or migrated through such habitats. Once common — and reportedly as high as a horse's belly 150 years ago — these grasslands have largely been degraded, invaded or covered over. "I think there's something critical in being able to see the larger picture" in a desert like the Chihuahuan, he concludes. "I also think that humans have a good deal of problem with that, and yet we are reaching [Earth's natural] limits. In order to accommodate that reality we have to see ourselves as part of a functioning system." This includes places we at first glance label "bleak and barren."
A closer look, Berman would argue, is long overdue.