New Mexico State University photography professor Bruce Berman braved haboobs of the borderland to capture the photographs that highlight his latest book, “A History of Dust.” The book also features 1930s dust storm photographs to contrast his photos he took in 2025. Scott Brocato recently spoke with Professor Berman about the book.
Scott Brocato:
Bruce, give us an overview of your book, “A History of Dust,” and what inspired you to write it. You weren't intending to make a book at first, correct?
Bruce Berman:
No. I was just...I am a photographer as well as a professor, and I was just out, “well, I think I'll go out shooting (pictures),” you know? Pretty spectacular and visual, dust storms. You know, if everybody remembers those, they're not something you see every day. So I just went out shooting, and then there was another one, and I went out shooting for that, and then pretty soon I kind of had a fun thing to do in a regular way. I didn't shoot every dust storm I don't think, but I darn near kind of went out and shot most of them.
Scott Brocato:
You're talking about in 2025 last year where there were 26, I believe, recorded dust storms when the average yearly dust storm is 2.2.
Bruce Berman:
Something like that.
Scott Brocato:
But were you standing in the middle of it? Were you sheltered when you were shooting all these photos?
Bruce Berman:
Well, first of all, there's dust storms and there's dusty days. This is NASA. They do the classification, their atmospheric unit. So a “dust storm” means half a mile visibility or less. A dust storm. A “dusty day” is like what we had mostly. But we had 12 dust storms, and that's like very severe. I mean, that's a half a mile visibility.
To answer your question, I just get in my car and drive around. I live in the south side of El Paso, so I'm just driving around the barrio, shooting down by the bridge, down by the river. And I got out of the car and shot some things when it was necessary, climb up in the freeway overpass like that. But I didn't have to wander far from my car. I had to figure out how to save my cameras and lenses.
Scott Brocato:
What did you use?
Bruce Berman:
Just my regular single lens reflex camera and lenses.
Scott Brocato:
Any special protection for the lenses?
Bruce Berman:
Well, I put a baggie over it, put on my shades for my eyes. Sometimes I had to put the camera under my shirt--I had a t-shirt on as well--just to protect the camera because dust getting in there is bad, but worse is blasting the lens with dust in the wind on the glass. That would be a disaster. So protecting the equipment was a big deal. And it made me think about the ‘30s guys in the Dust Bowl.
Scott Brocato:
Well, let's talk about those photographers, because your book contrasts some of the photographs from the 1930s era. Talk about some of those photographers.
Bruce Berman:
Well, most of them were part of a unit called the Farm Security Administration. And the Farm Security Administration was part of the Agriculture Department. This was an FDR- created thing, and basically it was to help the people in agrarian America who had been blasted out by the Depression, which wasn't just economic; it was also an ecological disaster, because the Dust Bowl was happening all during the ‘30s when the Depression was happening.
So the Library of Congress ended up owning--well, we, the citizens own everything done for the government, and those photographs were done for the government. So they're all at the Library of Congress. And you can go in there, there's a catalog and you just go through them. There's hundreds of thousands of photographs from that group. That group-- Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, Arthur Rothstein, Jack Delano--these photographers, they were young, in their 20s. They ended up being the great photographers in the next 30, 35 years. So they're really good photographs and they're available to anybody to go look at them.
Scott Brocato:
There's one in particular you just showed me before we spoke: “Black Sunday,” the event was called. Talk about that event.
Bruce Berman:
Black Sunday was April 14th, 1935. It was considered to be the largest, most fierce dust storm in the hemisphere, not just North America. And it was rolling black clouds of dust just over a five-state area: Colorado, New Mexico, Texas, I think Arkansas, Oklahoma. And my mom was actually in that dust storm. I didn't know that until I did the book. I have a photograph in the book of my mom and she's standing in an old car with a running board. And in May, 1935, she's a nice sunny girl. It turns out a month before it was that Black Sunday, the worst dust storm ever. And it used to blast the paint off cars. It used to make sun dunes. People had to climb in their second-floor window. The dunes were so high and covering the front of the house. Yeah, there's a couple of photos in there.
They were not done by that group of photographers. I had to go to little museums in these little towns like Ulysses, Kansas, for example. And I just researched and came across the photos and got permission to use them. And these are little, tiny museums and little road stops. And I would ask, is it okay if I use the photo? And they go, oh, we'd be honored to let you use those photos. So yeah, that was fun. That was a fun part of this.
Scott Brocato:
The book is dedicated to your mother, Pauline Lucille Farley Berman. Talk about her influence.
Bruce Berman:
When we were kids, my sister and I, my mom used to tell stories. And we grew up in Chicago. She ended up going to Chicago and lived there, married there, had a nightclub there. And so we were way far from out here, except she always had those different kind of ways. She was from Dalhart, Texas and up and down there: Texas, and Chickasha, Oklahoma, and up and down Oklahoma and Texas. So she had kind of different ways than most Chicago moms that I knew.
And she'd tell us these stories about the dust storms, and she'd say crazy things. Like my sister and I would roll our eyes like, "well, all the cars used to be black Ford Model Ts, but once the Dust Bowl came, they started making beige cars." And we'd go, what? And she'd say, "Well, the beige cars after the dust storms, the storms would blast the paint off the cars, the beige ones looked better. My sister and I would roll our eyes and go, "are you kidding?" It's this fantasy.
And then she'd also talk about these sand dunes that she literally had to climb in the second floor of her house to get in because the front was covered in a sand dune. And we thought she was like kind of telling stories. And coming across—well, first of all, us, you and I, and anyone who lives here in the spring of 2025, you could start to see where that would happen. And going through the photographs at Library of Congress, there they are: houses with sand dunes up to the second floor. So we were fascinated by those stories, but we thought they were kind of imaginary, you know?
And also, I personally—and my colleague here, Dr. Mary Lamonica—we do a lot of research on the 1930s and photography and this group. So we knew these photos, But I didn't know them in the depth they are. There's hundreds of thousands of photographs of the dust storms.
Scott Brocato:
And is the book available now?
Bruce Berman:
Yeah, it's on Amazon and it's there. The book came out in late December, but we're just kind of getting it out now.
It's a little book. I wanted a little book. I'm talking about size. I wanted a little book. It's precious. The photographs are usually on a facing page. There's one photo of mine in color, and the facing page is a black and white photograph. And the contrast of... a car going down the street in 35 doesn't look much different than a car going down the street in 2025. So there's these parallels and that's what I tried to do is match up the photos so you could see the dust storms were, you know, not 100 years apart, but almost. But the condition is the same for us as it was for the people in the 1930s as well. So I wanted to show that and I wanted a kind of a precious book because, you know, Personally, it is kind of a precious book because finally it's sort of like an ode to my mom's experience as a teenager, really. So yeah, I wanted a little book.
