Richard Misrach Featured in Pasatiempo

Long division: 'Border Cantos'

By Paul Weideman

In photographer Richard Misrach’s 13 years of taking pictures along the United States-Mexico border, he has seen all kinds of landscapes and fences and detritus. “The artifacts you see have a lot of different explanations,” he said by phone from his home in California’s Berkeley Hills. “Basically people have walked a long way from Central America and Mexico, and their clothes are filthy, and they often dump them after they’re across the border, because they bring fresh clothes with them. Also the Border Patrol has been known to make people dump whatever they have when they find them. You see backpacks and tennis shoes, religious icons and Bibles, and all kinds of things strewn along the border.”

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