MEXICO • 2023
Borderlands
Fifty days along the US–Mexico border — from Tijuana to Matamoros — tracing the lives lived in the space between two countries.
Year
2022
Region
Mexico
Duration
50 Days
Format
35 mm film
Published In
TIME • El País
ABOUT THIS PROJECT
The border is not a line. It is a territory — one that belongs fully to neither country and is claimed fiercely by the people who live inside it. I drove its length over fifty days, stopping in towns that exist only because the border exists.
There is an economy of waiting here. People wait for papers, for calls, for the right moment to cross. The photographs are about that waiting — the light it produces, the way it changes a face.
Shot on Kodak Portra 800 and Fuji Neopan 1600 pushed two stops. The grain was intentional. Some moments require texture.
PHOTO ESSAY
A man waits at the Nogales crossing, his documents folded in his breast pocket. Sonora, Mexico.
The steel bollard fence at dusk. Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua.
A woman carries water from the new well, 4km from the village centre.
Matamoros, Tamaulipas.