Thread: Documenting the border fence U.S./Mexico

Documenting the border fence between Mexico and the U.S.
(Pictures and links to videos at link.)

Msnbc.com continues its collaboration with Once magazine on the iPad. The following is excerpted from the November issue.

Melissa del Bosque, Once Magazine, writes: The steel fence zigs and zags from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico, a rust-colored scar on the American landscape. It passes through deserts and fertile farmland, backyards and wildlife refuges.

Eric White for Once Magazine

California, U.S.

For some politicians the fence is a talking point, embodying a promise to keep America safe. For many Americans who live near it, the fence, which covers 649 miles of the nearly 2,000-mile-long international border, speaks only of the failure of politics.

Since 2001, the Department of Homeland Security has turned the neighborhoods around the fence into militarized zones, replete with surveillance towers, the National Guard, sensors, and predator drones.

Eric White for Once Magazine

Arizona, U.S.

Their communities divided, those who live on either side of the fence simply call it “the wall.â€

In the Shadow of the Wall

Photography by Eric White and essay by Melissa del Bosque. Edited by Christy Wiles for Issue 2, November 2011.

Download Now: http://bit.ly/o9PY03

In Brief:

In a beautiful set of images, photographer Eric White documents the heavily contested U.S.-Mexico border as it winds its way through the scorching Sonoran desert to the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. In 2006, the United States Congress passed the Secure Fence Act, which required the Department of Homeland Security to spend additional resources on the fence. The purpose was to keep America safe and secure. In many cases, the fence has alienated people on both sides of the border and driven a wedge further between political parties within the U.S. In Melissa del Bosque’s written essay, she describes land seizures and immigrant deaths that some claim are a result of the fence. Eerily peaceful, these photographs tell a story seldom seen on the evening news.

I first came across Eric White’s work at the Center for Photography at Woodstock in 2010 as part of the exhibition, Photography Now: Either/And, Part II: The New Docugraphics. The title, The New Docugraphics played off of a now-historic photography movement that grew out of the 1975 exhibition, the New Topographics: Photographs of a Man-altered Landscape, which was curated by William Jenkins in collaboration with other artists for the George Eastman House. The New Topographics photographers included the young Stephen Shore, Bernd and Hilla Becher, and Robert Adams, whose images of industrial wastelands, tract homes, and suburban developments marked a radical departure from the romanticism of the natural landscapes favored by many of their predecessors. While the title of the 1975 New Topographics suggested a new approach to landscape photography, the title of the 2010 New Docugraphics exhibition refers to a shift away from a hard-line “old-schoolâ€