Infrastructures of Control is an ongoing collaboration between Dugan Meyer and Colter Thomas that aims to create a visual archive of security and surveillance infrastructure in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Guided by—and contributing to—the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s public map of U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) surveillance towers and checkpoints, we are working to locate, document, photograph, map, and study the infrastructures of U.S. border policing along the entire length of the U.S.-Mexico border.
The photographs in this exhibition here, all made by Colter, offer a look at how technologies of policing and surveillance are reshaping the landscapes of the borderlands region. In the online guide that accompanies this exhibit—which you can access through the QR code below and which includes analysis, archival documents, additional images, and other materials corresponding with the photographs on display—you can learn more about what these technologies are, how they are becoming increasingly integrated into infrastructures of control, and why this matters.
This exhibition marks more than a year of work, and we are just getting started. Our aim is to make the expanding infrastructures of U.S. border security more visible to public audiences. We hope that the material we produce will encourage viewers to think critically about what these technologies and infrastructures mean for ourselves and our neighbors, wherever they are coming from. One of the classic characteristics of infrastructure is that when it is working as intended, it often seems to recede into the background of life, taken for granted as though it always existed and couldn’t be otherwise. But these systems, from CBP surveillance programs to the border itself, require tremendous amounts of labor, money, and blood to function. And when we look at them closely, as we invite you to do here, we might come to understand that the “ultimate hidden truth of the world,” to quote the late David Graeber, “is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.”
You can read a short photo essay from our project in the Border Chronicle here (reprinted without a paywall in English here and en español aquí). And we talk about why we do this work in a Q&A with the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Dave Maass here. You can also read a piece about our exhibition in the Tucson Sentinel here.
Our work is supported by the Confluencenter for Creative Inquiry and the Mellon Foundation, as well as the W.A Franke Honors College, the Graduate & Professional Student Council, and the School of Geography, Development & Environment at the University of Arizona.