For the past four years Harbage Page has photographed the possessions left behind by immigrants crossing the U.S.-Mexican Border near Brownsville, Texas and Matamoros, Mexico. Immigrants swim across the Rio Grande and then quickly change from wet clothes into dry clothes and disappear into the general population. If stopped by the Border Patrol, they are asked to empty their pockets of everything non-essential. Harbage Page explains, “I see the resultant personal items strewn along the border as symbols or relics not only of a changing culture but also of a longing for a better life, security for one’s family, a safer environment.”
The photographs in Walking the Border are an intervention—at once aesthetic, archaeological, and archival—into the spaces and objects associated with the great migration north across the Rio Grande and into the United States. The photography by Susan Harbage Page provokes visual conversations about the material culture of the immigrant experience. Images of a deflated inner tube dropped by the road, a wallet mired, its contents spilling into the mud, footsteps revealed in soft earth, and river-wet clothes wrung, wadded, and cast aside document ordinary things possessed with extraordinary associations of flight, hope, panic, determination, and fear.
Opening January 7, 2011 in the Fed-Ex Global Education Center’s gallery.