Borderland looks at the U.S.-Mexico border through the landscape of the San Rafael Valley in southern Arizona, where renewed wall construction cuts across one of the region’s last open grasslands and an ecologically sensitive wildlife corridor. The series follows the ways a contested political boundary is inscribed onto the land through steel barriers, construction scars, and the conversion of remote terrain into border infrastructure.

Through landscape photography, I approach the valley as a place where state power takes material form in the terrain. In these photographs, the wall does not appear simply as a symbol of policy, but as an intervention that reorganizes movement through the land and interrupts ecological continuity. Black steel bollards, graded surfaces, and evidence of rapid construction are set against open grassland and mountain ranges, bringing monumentality and fragility into the same frame.

The border appears here not simply as a line of separation, but as a project that leaves lasting marks on the land. The series reflects on how ideology becomes physical and how security is enacted through permanent alteration of the landscape.

Photographed for The Atlantic