Complicated Stories

Looking for a larger more complicated picture story this week, I chose to look at collections about the border with Mexico. With a constantly changing and developing set of challenges and problems seen along the border, I wanted to see what the most recent collection of images would reflect. 

The package I chose is a story compiled by the New York Times titled ”Where Fear and Hope Collide: Images from the Mexican Border and Beyond.” The package was published in March of this year and were photographed by Azam Ahmed. The topic is obviously photographed all the time and while I don’t think this is my ultimate favorite package on the topic, I enjoy the combination of both storytelling and visual quality in a series of images that makes a huge huge huge topic understandable. A story that I wouldn’t know how to entirely cover from one end to the other of the spectrum is brought to reality in these images. We see everything from the before a journey and the people who are making the journey and why to what can happen if caught, alive or dead. We see the story from both sides of the border with emotion after emotion.

I find the order of the images particularly interesting as it seems rare now that we open a series immediately with very graphic and visual death. Transitioning into more safe (comparatively) and intimate moments and then back to travel and issue again.