The Big Bend

June 18, 2020

Photographs taken in Texas in 2020 along the US – Mexico border in the sweep of the Big Bend where the Rio Grande turns north for a hundred miles before it heads back to the southeast again on its way to the Gulf of Mexico. In Mexico the river is...

Saguaro Ville

June 18, 2020

These photographs were taken in 2020 along the US Mexico border, and include images made in Organ Pipe National Monument, Sonoran Desert National Monument, Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge, and the Barry M. Goldwater Range. “Saguaros grow in a rather narrow slice of the Sonoran Desert in Arizona, Mexico,...

Composite Scrolls | C. Gigantea

June 18, 2020

These composite images of saguaros (C.Gigantea) are printed on scrolling lengths of fine translucent Kozo paper. “The saguaro, with its great size and characteristic shape—its arms stretching heavenward, its silhouette often resembling a human—has become the emblem of the Sonoran Desert of southwestern Arizona. This is rightly so, for...

Binary Codex | The Habitat

February 14, 2020

For anyone who has traveled much of the river, Berman’s photographs are like family snapshots: many scenes are familiar, some are distressing, some look like accidents, and so many are nearly forgotten or almost missed. The series, printed in carbon pigment on three tall sheets of kozo washi ,...

Grid Poetics | Perdido

February 13, 2020

These works on paper are each a poetic assemblage of images and fragments mirroring the complexity of the place from which the images have been gathered.

The Rio Grande

November 24, 2019

I drove the entire river. Top to bottom.  Ain’t no river left in the the river. The peril of these species is all about lost habitat.  We have remade the river. If we can not get at it, farm it, ranch it, we take the water and set it...

Sierra San Luis

September 24, 2019

With the nights still cold, the last dry leaves shivered on the cottonwood trees, and the naked branches tested the warm afternoon with small, sticky, sap-coated, amber-tipped buds. I came across the word spray-painted black on the wall of a small side canyon: Perdido. The sign, for I took...

Ineffable Codex

March 27, 2018

I have worked for almost 10 years on Ineffable Codex. The images are rooted in the Grassland Photographs I made of the Chihuahuan Desert for the book “Trinity” I did with Charles Bowden. The project started in earnest in 2008 when I was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship. My work...

480 Plates

March 19, 2018

First installed in an exhibit in the Lannan Foundation Gallery, Berman’s seminal work, 480 Plates, is an ode to the desert that lies along the U.S. and Mexico border. Each of the 480 images is a fine silver print mounted on a 5 1/2 inch square of aluminum, cut and filed...

Decomposites

March 1, 2018

I am sitting at my desk right now  … looking at aluminum. The impetus for the plates comes from the mixed media and installation work I have done over the years, and an effort to move beyond the tyranny of the perfect silver or now digital print. I wanted...