Both Sides Now
Cite Digital Review of “Two Sides of The Border” U.S. and Mexico Border
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Image credits from left to right: William A. Garnett, Iwan Baan
Celeste Ponce reviews Two Sides of the Border: Reimagining the Region by Tatiana Bilbao, Nile Greenberg, and Ayesha S. Ghosh on Rice University’s Design Alliance ─ Cite Digital
“The book’s essays begin with the left side of the spread devoted to a diagram of the US and Mexico’s boundary lines. The origins of the essays are placed on the map with a thinner longitudinal line that extends past Mexico along various latitudinal degrees. While the essays span across both countries their histories and current challenges, the diagrams enable the reader to navigate between cities. But ultimately, it’s Baan’s full-color images that both ground the reader and reveal the human conditions behind the stories. Baan pulls you out of the window seat and takes you on a magic carpet ride, zooming in and out of people’s homes, backyards, streets, and aerial views. He reflects that seeing the border and the wall prototypes from the air puts it in such perspective, seeing the massive density on the south side of the wall and this little fence that’s trying to hold it back. I think it’s a metaphor for what we are experiencing these days.
In the spirit of photographer William A. Garnett’s ‘Lakewood’ aerial series, Baan’s industrial borderland landscapes cut off the horizon. The image’s angle is turned inward, with subjects pushed out to the edge of the frame, close enough to touch. Like Garnett, Baan seizes the dichotomy between the ‘imagined and rejected’ in the various borderlands by beautifully capturing the desolate rural and empty suburban landscapes. By looking down from an altitude low enough to recognize the vast absence of human activity, one strangely looks back at 1952’s endless geometric rows of mass-produced homes within large swaths of ‘desolation’ captured by Garnett. Similarly, Baan’s photograph of stucco boxes that appear to go on forever in a suburb in Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, is a telling example of NAFTA’s effect on the industrial and rural areas of northern Mexico. Baan explains, ‘you think it is just an economic agreement, but it has a major impact also on the landscape of different places.’”