Jérôme Sessini began photographing Mexico’s drug-cartel conflict in 2008. The Wrong Side: Living on the Mexican Border gathers the resulting two-year project, concentrating on Culiacán, Tijuana and, above all, Ciudad Juárez. Published by Contrasto in 2012, the book addresses the violence surrounding the United States–Mexico border through an extended work of documentary photography rather than the isolated images by which such conflicts are often encountered.

Sessini’s approach is grounded in sustained engagement. Attention to concrete particulars gives the work its structure, while the breadth of the project acknowledges that drug-related violence cannot be contained within a single incident, city or explanation. Its geographic range is focused rather than encyclopedic: three cities provide distinct points of entry into a conflict whose consequences extend across civic life and the border region.

The title’s “wrong side” carries both political and perceptual weight. It evokes the asymmetry of the border while questioning the distance from which violence is viewed and understood. Sessini does not present Mexico merely as scenery for a crisis; his subject is a social reality shaped by criminal power, insecurity and proximity to the United States. The photographs therefore belong as much to the history of the region’s social conditions as to the traditions of photojournalism and the documentary photoessay.

For a collector, the book’s significance rests in the conversion of a sustained field project into a concentrated photographic volume. Its value lies not in offering a definitive account, but in fixing a particular period and geography through the close observation of one photographer. As a hardcover publication devoted to a coherent, long-form body of work, The Wrong Side merits attention from collections concerned with contemporary documentary practice, representations of Mexico and the evolving visual record of border conflict.