David Taylor’s Working the Line begins with an unassuming administrative fact: a sequence of obelisks set along the U.S.–Mexico boundary, from El Paso and Juarez to San Diego and Tijuana, to mark the international line. The photographs return to these monuments as fixed points in terrain that is by turns beautiful and punishing, and the project’s persistence—Taylor received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008 for the ongoing border examination—gives the work its measure.
Taylor did not remain outside the apparatus. He obtained unusual access to U.S. Border Patrol facilities, agents and routine operations, and the book moves between landscape, portrait, serial imagery, interiors of detention cells and transport vehicles, and close detail. Those registers are made to answer a subject in which border security, human and drug smuggling, the construction of the border fence and its pressure on the land are bound together. Agents call their field work line work, a phrase the title takes up; Taylor’s own time on the line yields a view that treats the border as neither policy alone nor scenery. Essays by Hannah Frieser and Luis Alberto Urrea accompany the photographs, and Rebecca Solnit’s response singles out the book’s many angles as a way of approaching the border as an idea.
What gives the project its distinction is the conversion of survey monuments—bureaucratic markers—into a photographic architecture. The obelisks supply repetition, scale and distance; the human and institutional material introduces disruption and consequence. The images are documentary in nature, yet their formal and visual force carries the work beyond the genre’s usual limits, so the book reads as sustained attention to a difficult political subject rather than a record of one assignment.
Radius Books issued the volume at 148 pages with roughly 120 photographs, hardbound in a slipcase with an accordion-fold component. That structure extends the logic of boundary marking into the object itself, allowing the chain of monuments to be encountered as a continuous line as well as page by page. For collectors, the book’s interest lies in this coherence of subject, sequence and design, and in the collaboration among photographer, essayists and publisher that produced it. The border has only grown more contested since the pictures were made; Working the Line meets that condition with attention rather than argument.
