ABOUT
Michael P. Berman wanders the terrain of the American West, Mexico, Norteno and the extensive grasslands of Mongolia. Mr. Berman’s classically executed black and white photographs participate in and extend the tradition of western landscape photography; each body of work is distilled from extensive exploration of a cohesive landscape over time. After completing a series of photographs he cuts up the negatives and prints and uses them as the basic medium for installations and paintings.
Michael P. Berman was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008 to photograph the remnant grasslands of the Chihuahuan Desert. His photographs are included in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Amon Carter Museum and the Museum of New Mexico. In 2013, he received the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts in New Mexico and has also been a recipient of Painting Fellowships from the Arizona Commission on the Arts and the Wurlitzer Foundation; his installations, photographs, and paintings have been reviewed in Art in America, and exhibited throughout the country. Berman’s work has been published in several books including Gila: Radical Visions; The Enduring Silence and the first and third books of a border trilogy with writer Charles Bowden, Inferno and Trinity. His most recent book, published by Museum of New Mexico Press, available October 2019, is Perdido: Sierra San Luis.
Mr. Berman was born in New York City in 1956, and went west to Colorado College where he studied biology and worked with peregrine falcons before embracing his photographic exploration of the land. He lives in Southwestern New Mexico in the Mimbres Valley, and is a founding and current board member of the Gila Resources Information Project. He has received grant support for his photographic and environmental work from the McCune and Lannan Foundation.
WATCH
NMPBS Interview with Michael Berman
SELECT WORKS
Images are printed in varying sizes and limited editions, the Plate Composite pieces can be commissioned from available images. Request a list of available images: art@galleriurbane.com
EXHIBITIONS
Past Exhibition
BOOKS
By Michael P. Berman, Foreward by Tim DeChristopher, Essay by Rodrigo Sierra Corona, Afterword by Valer Clark. “No estoy perdido. I am not lost. I like this country. I am happy here, and I feel safe… The border throws you off, but it also wakes you up. I was not always this comfortable here, and it is a bit of a story how I fell in love with Sierra San Luis. It starts with the day I saw the last Mexican wolf on American soil— not one of the reintroduced ones with leather dog-collar trackers strapped around their necks, but a wild one up from Sonora or maybe Durango— and it ended when an old Mexican rancher, the man who killed the same wolf, opened a locked gate for me and let me in.” -Michael P. Berman. The remarkable Sierra San Luis forms the nexus of the Sierra Madres and Rocky Mountains. Berman wandered the Mexican borderlands occupied by Ranchers, wildlife and narcos. His documentation — photographs and words— explores the meaning of the beautiful and rugged landscape and provides a poetic understanding of how one learns to see the land. As Berman notes, the ecological systems on the planet are failing, yet the Sierra San Luis collapse has reversed itself- water, soil, and ecological diversity- are all increasing in quantity and improving in quality. Why here and nowhere else?