Entry Title: " Working the Line"
Name: David Taylor, United States
Category: Professional, Political


Entry Description: For the last three years I have been photographing the U.S.-Mexico border between El Paso/Juarez and Tijuana/San Diego. It is a territory in transition. During that period the United States Border Patrol has doubled in size and the federal government has constructed over 600 miles of pedestrian fencing and vehicle barrier. With apparatus that range from simple tire drags to seismic sensors the border is under constant surveillance. To date the Border Patrol has attained “operational control” in many areas, however people and drugs continue to cross. Much of that traffic occurs in the most remote areas of the desert.

David Taylor earned an MFA from the University of Oregon and a BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts and Tufts University. His photographs, multimedia installations, and artist’s books have been exhibited in group and solo exhibitions at the The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut; 516 Arts, Albuquerque, New Mexico; the Stanlee and Gerald Rubin Center for the Visual Arts at the University of Texas at El Paso; El Paso Museum of Art; SF Camerawork, San Francisco; Society for Contemporary Photography, Kansas City, MO; and Northlight Gallery at Arizona State University, Tempe. His work is in a number of permanent collections, including Columbia College Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago; Washington State Arts Commission, Olympia; University of Washington, Seattle; El Paso Museum of Art; Fidelity Investments, Boston; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; and the Palace of the Governors/New Mexico History Museum. Taylor’s ongoing examination of the U.S.-Mexico border was supported by a 2008 Fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation and the work will be published in a forthcoming monograph from Radius Books.