Please Note: These images were produced on an Apple computer and may appear to have too much contrast on some PC monitors.

Artist Statement

All around us, there are borders: the fences in our yards and around our houses which define what is ours and not our neighbors, to walls that are constructed to define the boundaries of nationality, ideology, and culture. These borders suggest not only physical boundaries, but also psychological, sociological, and cultural difference.  If we accept the premise that humanity and the world population is one, particularly in a time of globalization, why do we feel the need to define what is ours and not for others to experience?
 
The border between the United States of America and Mexico is a landscape both natural and artificial. To document this landscape has been to also record the border of earth and sky, a junction both physical and symbolic, both prosaic and metaphysical. In some forgotten places, the border is a line sketched by barbed wire fence, in other places it is an institutionalized prison wall, brightly lit throughout the night and carefully monitored by the Border Patrol using the latest surveillance technology.  Tracing this national demarcation from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico has been to plot the difficulties of imposing and enforcing this political agenda on an unrelenting and uncooperative natural environment. 

I grew up along the southern and western edge of the United States in Chula Vista, California, 5 miles north of Tijuana.  For me the border has always been not a line but a zone, not a point of transition but the place where I live.

This project was started in 2006 and grew out of earlier work on the peace walls in Northern Ireland and the security barrier in Israel/ Palestine.   The images were made using a Mamiya 6 x 7 cm camera, on color negative film, which was then scanned and digitally output to Fuji Crystal Archive color photographic paper.