Photographer Taylor "Works the Line"

With squinted eyes braced against the bright Southwestern sun, the landscape blurs past like a gold-hued strip painting by Gerhard Richter. In the middle of the dust and weeds, next to the triple-stranded barbed wire fence that marks the border between the United States and Mexico, David Taylor glimpses what at first appears to be a sleight of hand of the summer heat, a concrete obelisk rising from the ground. Taylor, a photographer-professor from the University of Arizona, has found the inspiration for his next project.

The project, “Working the Line,” records 274 of those obelisks in a photography exhibit at the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies. Taylor’s documentation of these monuments is a contemporary reflection on a survey conducted by the photographer D.R. Payne between 1891 and 1895 under the patronage of the Boundary Commission. In addition to tracing the path of the obelisks, Taylor’s work chronicles the daily events he witnessed along the way, utilizing “the monuments [as] witnesses to the segregation of two political entities that aren’t nearly as monolithic as we like to think.”

Since the monuments last had their time in the spotlight, much of the physical, political, and social landscape surrounding the border has changed. At a panel before the opening of the exhibit, Taylor pointed out that “there is an awareness that grows, knowing that this is a border that mankind has established for themselves.” The photos in “Working the Line” showcase just that. They are colorful depictions of powerful, contradictory images: first-generation Mexican Americans working as Border Patrol Officers, gun-toting Mexican soldiers amiably giving Taylor directions; air-conditioned immigration offices alongside empty detention centers; and perhaps most movingly, apprehended drug smugglers who were unknowingly used as decoys by their colleagues. Taylor’s photos demand a re-imagining of the international boundary and consideration of the intricacy of the web of human relationships that surrounds it.

Taylor began his almost three-year-long project in 2007. Over the years since Taylor’s documentation, the United States Border Patrol has doubled in size, and the federal government has constructed over 600 miles of new barrier that is under constant surveillance. Although these measures have allowed Border Patrol to gain control over much of the expanse of the border, people and drugs continue to cross the border, primarily in the most remote, rugged areas of the Southwestern deserts. More than anything, Taylor wants viewers of the exhibition “to contemplate the complexity of the situation.” “Instead of entertaining the idea of getting across the border,” Taylor says, he hopes to force audiences “to look deeper by traveling its length” and to “portray a highly complex, physical, social, and political topography during a period of dramatic change.”

In Taylor’s pictures, some sections of the border fence seem laughable, as if one could cross them simply by climbing the conveniently placed monument. Other images of the fence are much more imposing, especially those in the newly built areas, which rise like fortress walls from the desert ground. When asked if his book of photographs would serve as a map showing the way for illegal immigrants, Taylor dismissed the possibility. He purported that the passages are already known, before adding, “Where there’s a wall, there’s a way.”