Desire Lines
Lara Shipley
Lara Shipley’s Desire Lines follows old and new movements through the desert landscape of the Sonoran borderlands of the United States and Mexico. Paths taken by migrants and border agents, of missionaries and conquistadors, of indigenoeus people and industrialists. The messy and attimes violent collision of peoples has created a region that defies the harmfully simplistic narratives so frequently attributed to our borders.
Lara Shipley (born 1980) is an American photographer. She is a bookmaker who primarily makes work about rural culture, identity, mythology, storytelling and photography’s relationship to evidence.
The subject of Desire Lines is the Sonoran desert between Arizona and Mexico, where the border between the United States and Mexico currently runs. At its core it’s a study of the land itself. Shipley’s photographs focus on the disorienting experience of this landscape. A place of beauty or danger depending of those moving through it.
It becomes clear that the land can’t be seen separately from the people who live here and pass through it. Deceptively empty, the landscape is under constant watch, heavily surveilled and controlled, with an ever-increasing military presence that has seeped into the lives of residents in surrounding communities. In the upcoming American elections immigration will be an important issue. But here, in the Sonoran borderlands, the increasing polarized debates about immigration policy and enforcement are being lived each and every day. Shipley lays out how the more militarized border deliberately drives migrants away from crossing the border in cities and into more inhospitable and dangerous territory, leading to many more deaths.
Lara Shipley places the current immigration crisis unfolding at the border into a much longer historical context. Desire Lines looks at migration as an inherently human act. One that has defined human history and the geopolitical framework of our planet. She shows migration is from all times. Most Americans themselves are descended from immigrants. She’s making obvious that many of the aspirations, desires, and implications that drive migration remains largely the same. That’s why she speaks of desire lines. Opponents of immigration won’t speak of desire lines but of drug routes. But smuggling people already yields more than enough.
Shipley’s photographs are seen in dialogue with interviews from migrants and long-term residents, 20th century oral histories and 19th and 20th century archival photographs. This mix of time and perspective highlights a region long marked by migration, individual desire and preservation, but also systemic dominance and colonial control, hidden in hundreds of square miles of remote terrain.
Shipley has explored a wide array of visual languages in this book. Desire Lines is a book that smartly rethinks how archival visuals can enhance a contemporary photography project. There are black and white photographs, colour photographs, archival photographs, collages, a variety of maps and even negatives. There are long exposure photographs, portraits, landscapes and images overlaid on top of one another. Many of the images are attentive to the harshness of the desert light and live.
Desire Lines
Photographer: Lara Shipley
Publisher: Overlapse
Published in 2023
Softcover, section-sewn, OTA-bound with printed paper covers, two inserts
208 pages, 170 photographs, satellite maps and archival images, 17 x 22,5 cm
Essay by Lara Shipley and quotes from interviews taken by Lara Shipley
Finalist for the Lucie Photobook Prize 2023