On The Edge of the Edge – The U.S. – Mexico Border
El Paso, Oct. 31 (Halloween), 2008
Halloween on El Paso Street, the first (or last) block of America. Everyone is dressed and laying a festival veneer over the street. 5:30pm, people still rushing to the bridge to Juarez to get home (especially these days, trying to get home before dark, before the murders begin).
Cookie is one angry Chihuahua.
Juarez
This man played in the streets of Juarez for all my first years in La Frontera. He was blind. He was small. He made music like a special desert bird, joyful to bathe in just a drop of water, joyful to sing, even to the passing and witless American tourists.
Carlos is his name.
I don’t know…what…maybe 10 or 11?
No doubt, though, he is the leader of his pack.
Ciudad Acuna, Mexico
A Mexican border city has begun fining U.S. drivers who cross the border to fill extra drums, tanks or barrels with government-subsidized Mexican fuel.
I am supposed to be packing right now. I have a job in another city. It starts in three weeks. I won’t be leaving. This corner, this light, these people, their shadows, have inveighed my life for an adulthood…a long time.
Why do I ever leave my loft?
Went to the gym where a friend of over three years, a retired professor at the local university, someone who has never displayed anything but kindness and goodwill, out of the clear blue, no warning, told me “…the Jews got what they deserved after all the stuff they did as bankers in Germany, don’t you think?”
Wha-a-a-a-a-a?!
Editor’s Note: For other images from the Remnant series, see the July 13, 2007 and the May 12, 2008 posts. Use the calendar in the right column.
SEE VIDEO: http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/video/player?titleID=1372185572
Borders. North and south. Mexico is a yin yang of the first order.
See what’s going on on the southern border and get some insights into what’s going on on the northern one.
Article by the always interesting and powerful Charles Bowden with cut-to-the-bone humane photographs by superb Magnum shooter, Alex Webb.
Assume nothing.
I asked this man, in Espanol, if I could photograph him and his Chihuahua (part of a series I’ve been doing for a long time).
“I don’t speak Spanish,” he countered.
Why would I think he was Spanish-speaking?
Photo and story by Julian Cardona
March 31, 2008
About 50 Juárez police officers protested what they consider the arbitrary arrests of fellow officers by the recently arrived Mexican army in ciudad Juarez. They were protesting the alleged framing of numerous officers on charges of drug possession.
El Paso: foreground.
Juarez: Background.
Words written in blood on old documents and rattling around in people’s heads who don’t live there.
Miguel.
Another border encounter.
He’s a savior for me on this day.
James Barraza prowls the Segundo barrio with his Bible and attempts to spread “the good word.”
“Slept in the cellar (of a Ludlow Street tenement)
where the water was ankle deep on the mud floor”
View more work -and hear an excellent NPR audio clip- by the great Danish-American documentary photojournalist. He was one of the first to use “flash,” (first introduced in Germany in 1887). Riis cast the mold for what a “Concerned Photographer,” is, and launched a century of relevant, motivating and society-changing “witnessing.”
Editor’s Note:
For more images and audio clip: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91981589
I’m driving around my city. I’m moving my operation a little to the north of where I am now, north of the border, north of the borderline, north of my reality. I’m already feeling separation depression. So I drive around my turf of 30 years. I don’t have to look anymore, I know the bricks, the cracks, the fault lines. I’ve shot them a million times and re-shot them. I stick the camera out the sunroof and let the car become part of the camera. The car is the camera. and I tour my myth. This is between me and it, not meant for others. All of my work is getting there now, it’s between me and it.
Please check out: An internationally touring multimedia exhibit on Darfur.
Darfur is another border between Europe and sub-Sahara Africa, between Muslim and Christian, between (whatever is left of) sanity and outright brutal lunacy.
Learn more from some of the world’s best photographers.
PHOTO OF THE WEEK: June 17-????, 2008
World has gone crazy.
Murder and hell in this landscape.
Stop taking your drugs you busted up stinkin’ American pricks!
PHOTO OF THE WEEK: May 23-30, 2008
Notes from my Journal, September 1986
I am an illegal alien in a strange land.
That’s a phrase they use a lot in the newspaper here: Illegal Alien.