Photo collection captures the borderland

BY MARIA GALLUCCI
The News
Sept. 2, 2009

A Mexican and a U.S. photographer have hit the road together to promote their bilingual, bicultural reflection on U.S.-Mexico border communities, a photography book titled "En la línea/On the Line."

Fernando Meza and Byron Brauchli presented their project last week in Mexico City at the Veracruzano Cultural Center in the Coyoacán neighborhood. Photographs compiled in the book are also on display now through Friday, Sept. 11 at the center's Galería Veracruzana.

"There exists this cultural development at the border that few people know about," Meza said before the presentation. "Our border has been characterized just by violence and immigration...But the border is very big."

The 2008 book is divided between Brauchli's black-and-white images of the border's Western side and Meza's colorful landscapes of empty ranches in Río Bravo, the eastern Mexico pueblo outside Matamoros, Tamaulipas in which the photographer was raised.

écompanying texts are provided by JaviAcr Durán, from the University of Arizona, and Leticia Mora and Vincent Kholer, both from the Veracruzana University. The two universities assisted in editing the compilation.

Brauchli's images are part of his collection titled "Cultural Refractions: Border Life in the No Man's Land," a series that juxtaposes the antique and contemporary by capturing modern-day images with a 19th-century platinum-palladium photography technique.

The photographer said that he had previously thought of the U.S-Mexico border as a place to avoid. As a graduate student in Austin, Texas, he and his Mexican wife often had to cross over to visit her family in Veracruz.

"It was sort of a no man's land that you wanted to skip over," he said. "Then, after we did more and more journeys, it became this intriguing third culture, a country almost, and a collaboration of the two cultures."

His images, taken mostly between 1997 and 1998, capture moments that could have been captured on either side of the border.

"Border Crossing Line" and "Border Taxi," for example, both show crowded parking lots packed with cars in Ciudad Juárez and Nogales, Sonora, respectively.

"Vía y mural" ("Route and Mural") captures an urban painting in Del Río, Texas that depicts women frying tortillas, a man pulling at his accordion and a cowboy on his horse. "GuadalupanO shows the figure of the Mexico's patron saint Guadalupe painted on the concrete pillar of an El Paso, Texas highway overpass.

Meza's color photographs, taken from his "Paisaje de la desolación" ("Landscape of Desolation") collection, form a nostalgic, bittersweet look at empty rural countryside.

Growing up in Río Bravo, Meza said he was surrounded by ranches and family farms. Today, however, the landscape has been replaced by large-scale crops of corporate farms or by the empty, crumbling shells of what used to be.

"A way of life has ended," he said. "The family ranches that existed during the age when I grew up no longer exist."

Demonstrating a similar sentiment in the book, he juxtaposes a 2002 photograph of a thriving ranch with a 2007 image of the same home, this time worn down from abandonment and neglect.

His 1997 photograph "Sombras de la ensoñación" ("Shadows of Reverie") is an inside-looking-out view of a concrete building in ruins, what was formerly a cotton barn. "Se acabó el trabajo" ("The Work is Done") is a 2003 image of a rusty tractor idly sitting on a barren field.

Brauchli said that part of the book's mission was to sensitize readers to the culture issues happening today along the U.S.-Mexico frontier.

"As it taught me, I hope that [the book] makes people more aware of the border, that area between Mexico and America," he said.