US/Mexico Border (San Ysidro CA)
Photograph
US/Mexico Border (San Ysidro CA)
1979
Chromogenic development print
2/20
Image: 46.5 x 71 cm (18 5/16 x 27 15/16 in.)
Paper: 51 × 76.5 cm (20 1/16 × 30 1/8 in.)
Matted: 65.7 × 86.5 × 0.4 cm (25 7/8 × 34 1/16 × 3/16 in.)
Gift of W.M. Hunt/Dancing Bear, 2005
2004.0736.0002
Inscriptions verso (ink): [title] / 2/20 / [signature]
TextAlex Webb inaugurated a 25-year photographic project, Crossings, along the two-thousand-mile US-Mexico border several years after the 1970 Boundary Treaty, which marked an end to the two countries’ outstanding territorial disputes. He quickly found he “had to respond to these worlds in color” and abandoned black-and-white for color photography. The saturated colors of the landscape underscore the coexistence of beauty and suffering along the border, where a field of cheerful flowers might serves as a backdrop for a dramatic helicopter arrest.
