D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
July
2008
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With the aid of a new Guggenheim Fellowship, Michael Berman photographs the Chihuahuan Desert to help others see the need to save it.
By Richard Mahler
I am looking at a Michael Berman photograph for the first time. Transported by his composition of featureless sky, jagged rocks and desiccated plants, I feel as though I am seeing the Chihuahuan Desert anew. More than that, I inhabit this wilderness. Displayed here, in a windowless basement at Western New Mexico University, is an expanse many would dismiss as bleak and forbidding: to be endured en route to somewhere else, preferably someplace greener and softer. One reviewer of last September's "Under A Dry Moon" exhibition dubbed these images "harsh and haunting." Yet I am drawn by the sublime clarity of Berman's black-and-white print. There is purity in the parched elements it delineates, and I find unexpected serenity in this primal outback.
"Most people approach the [desert] landscape with an idea of what the landscape will be," the photographer explains when we meet at his Mimbres Valley studio, eight months after the pictures leave Fleming Hall. "The idea that I have been working with is to show what's actually there."
Self-portrait by Michael Berman.
Photos by Michael Berman, copyright Michael Berman. |
A high-energy, born-and-raised New Yorker, Berman spends weeks at a time wandering the Southwest's "empty" quarters, documenting their little-known diversity with a boxy, large-format camera. He specializes currently in the most arid and least populated portions of the upper Chihuahuan Desert, which stretches from near Tucson east to Big Bend and from Silver City south into the Mexican states of Chihuahua and Sonora. It's an area Berman dearly loves and through his actions seeks to preserve.
"Aesthetics and art," he declares, "can provide a system of value as a way of seeing what's significant, beautiful and important." These lands are integral parts of a whole. Lose them — by draining aquifers, building roads, overgrazing livestock and the like — and a delicately structured ecosystem crumbles like a castle made of sand.
The indefatigable Berman roams the region in a dusty truck that boasts a mid-six-figure odometer reading. He listens to Spanish-language instruction tapes as he drives and, relying on dog-eared maps and handwritten notes scrawled on slips of paper, pulls over at any place that grabs his interest. There is no cellphone service where Berman goes and he eschews GPS. Tiny groceries give sustenance — tortillas, oranges, cookies, avocados — and a blacked-out pickup shell provides a makeshift darkroom. Hauling little more than camera gear and water, Berman tramps for miles through terrain bereft of shade and habitation.
"People don't understand how far I can walk," laughs Berman, a trim and athletic-looking 52-year-old. "A man will point to the edge of his ranch and say, 'I own everything up to the horizon.' I always walk to the horizon."
Compact and clean cut, with muscle-toned arms and an unwavering gaze, the photographer discourses in an intense cascade of real-life stories, mind-life insights and contrarian opinions. Berman regularly questions the status quo. His thoughtful humor is documented in well-etched smile lines. During an afternoon visit to the whitewashed studio and home in the Black Range foothills he shares with his wife, Jennifer, and a posse of dogs, Berman speaks eloquently about his art, concern for the environment, and recent receipt of a prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship. The grant helps support his ongoing projects along la frontera.
"I was very fortunate to get [the award]," allows Berman, his expressive hands rubbing either side of his forehead. The photographer's proposal was one of a handful funded among hundreds of applicants. "I think it's a great honor that [a review panel] outside the region would think our landscape is significant." He isn't used to people understanding — much less underwriting — his walkabouts.
In an essay that accompanied the Guggenheim application, Berman referred to the Chihuahuan Desert as "a kind of puzzle," composed of fragments that few try to put together. "Humans have churned it, stripped it, and let it wash away," he wrote. "What it could be, what it once was, is a beautiful mystery." Even among many who spend their entire lives anchored in the Chihuahuan, Berman suggests, it is alternately cursed, misunderstood and avoided.
Over the past decade Berman has assembled thousands of photographs, depicting not only the Chihuahuan Desert's surprisingly graceful, fragile grassy pockets and rare oases but its much larger swaths of overgrazed and abandoned basin-and-range country. Equally represented are lonely plains of gravel and snakeweed, knobby cones of lava and tuff, blocky ridges of fossil-laden limestone, and sprawled skeletons of hapless cows, birds and coyotes. Once in a while the weathered face of a person or the right angles of a human-made object appear in his portfolio. But seldom. After all, this is one of the least-populated, least-visited zones of North America. And this is even more true south of Columbus.
"I have a sort of romantic relationship with Chihuahua," concedes Berman, referring to Mexico's estado grande. "It's an incredibly diverse area; essentially the Mexican 'wild west.' Everything we have in the American Southwest they have, too, plus an overlay of indigenous cultures and their own unique versions of settlement."
New Mexico's Chihuahuan Desert begins just outside Silver City, Deming, Las Cruces or most any other town clustered near life-sustaining water. It is an environment where rivers sink beneath gray sand and spring dust storms famously conceal black asphalt, where ochre hills flatten into formless slopes and blue-white mirages shimmer below relentless sunshine.
"I'm comfortable in these places," says Berman. "I love looking at them."
Wandering alone in nature is the photographer's life-long passion, and taking pictures is a handy excuse to venture into a trackless defile. The work that results is shown in galleries, museums, universities, homes, books and magazines. In altered form, the images find their way into abstract multimedia collages and stamped metal plates.
"What I really like to do is look at things," says Berman. "In this culture it's very hard to get that license, so that's why I'm an artist and a photographer. It's not because I particularly love my medium — I've tried science and other things — but because it seems a legitimate reason to go see places."
A 15-year resident of Grant County, Berman began his sojourn in the mountain west in the mid-1970s as a student at Colorado College. After earning a biology degree and working in that arena for a time, he switched to photography and visual arts. Berman went on to earn an MFA from Arizona State University before relocating first to Silver City's Chihuahua Hill, then the Mimbres Valley.
The handsome, Southwest-style home he and his wife designed and built perches on a rolling tract of open land near the village of San Juan. Berman reminds a visitor that the juniper-studded grassland he inhabits above the trickling Mimbres is an outstretched finger of a complex set of interrelated ecosystems.
"The Chihuahuan Desert is primarily a smooth and rolling landscape," he says, sweeping his dark brown eyes toward the south, where the craggy Floridas loom like a lost pirate ship on a sea of scrub. "You get mountains that barely rise up to the pines as well as grasslands that reach up into these same ranges."
In recent years Berman has collaborated with Arizona writer Charles Bowden in like-minded offerings that "try to get at" the Chihuahuan through text as well as images. The duo, joined at times by Ju_rez photographer Juli_n Cardona, are creating a trilogy of books that began with the release of Inferno in 2006. A second volume will be published in 2009 and the third some time after that.
While their words and pictures consider the desert from varying perspectives, these men share an understanding Bowden outlines this way: "You go out there at first to see what there is to see. You climb big things, cross dunes, enter into fabled craters, make long marches on trails older than the English language. Slowly you learn to stop and look, then to fall to your knees and crawl, then to cease movement at all. You begin ignoring vistas, trash the entire baggage you've toted with you that tells you what things should look like and enter into what things are."
Berman, 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.