“Border Lord” is an ongoing observation of life in California’s Imperial County - a swath of irrigated desert in the state’s Southeast, flanked to the North by the environmental catastrophe that is the Salton Sea and to the South by the towering new US/Mexico border wall.
Border Lord and the area it seeks to understand is a study in contradictions, of hope and despair, capturing a place where many come to seek opportunity and others find it to be conspicuously absent.
The work casts a wide net on the area, turning the lens on the region’s surveillance infrastructure, children and teenagers, farmers and agricultural workers, septuagenarian snowbirds escaping the northern winter to soak in concrete, freeway adjacent hot springs, evidence of border crossing activity and constant reminders that the journey North too often ends in tragedy.