Francesco Anselmi’s Borderlands examines the United States side of the border with Mexico during a sharply defined political period: 2017 to 2019, at the height of the Trump administration. Working across a frontier extending roughly 3,600 kilometres, Anselmi treats the region not simply as a line of enforcement or a backdrop to migration, but as an inhabited territory with its own social complexity.

The project takes the form of a documentary essay. Rather than organizing the border around moments of emergency alone, Anselmi attends to the people who live there as well as those who pass through it. This broader frame shifts the emphasis from spectacle to duration—from the singular incident to the conditions under which everyday life continues. The border consequently appears as both a political division and a place shaped by movement, settlement, policy and coexistence.

That approach is consistent with Anselmi’s wider concern for border regions and for the effects contemporary border policies have on their residents. Here, geographic specificity and historical timing give the work particular force. The photographs belong to an identifiable phase in recent US political history, yet the book’s sustained attention to the land and its communities resists reducing that history to headlines.

Published by Kehrer Verlag in 2024, Borderlands gives this multi-year project a coherent book form. For a serious collection of documentary photography, its importance rests neither on claims of rarity nor on sensational subject matter, but on the disciplined scope of its inquiry: one contested territory, observed over time and understood as a lived environment. It merits attention as a considered photographic record of how national policy, migration and ordinary life meet along one of the world’s most scrutinized borders.