“Infrastructures of Control” is a collaborative research project and visual archive focusing on U.S. border security infrastructure. The 30 photographs included in this exhibition—organized to accompany Regardless of Frontiers: The First Amendment and the Exchange of Ideas Across Borders, a symposium hosted by the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University in October 2024—were made during research trips conducted along the length of the U.S.- Mexico border between 2023-2024. We have been guided by the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s publicly accessible map of U.S. Customs and Border Protection surveillance technologies—a map to which we are also contributing through our work and which is included in this exhibition—and by other collaborations. The photographs offer glimpses of a sprawling network of surveillance and enforcement, a ‘system of systems’ that extends across a wide range of landscapes in the southwestern United States, from arid patches of desert to river deltas to small towns and bustling metropolises, residential backyards, public parks, college campuses, private ranches, military proving grounds, and more.

In our work, we understand border security—and the border itself—as a form of infrastructure, what Brian Larkin (2013) has called “the architecture of circulation.” Like police power more generally, the aim of border security is not to prevent movement altogether but rather to control it, to condition how people and ideas can move through the world. In this sense, securing the border is a spatial project: It involves the intervention into social relations of all kinds, a mission not only to watch and categorize who and what moves—this is, ultimately, what the paramilitary institutions of border security are after when they speak of achieving “situational awareness”—but to reorganize those relations, and thus to remake space itself. And therefore the infrastructure of border security is much more than an accumulation of data and steel and more than the networks of technology and force plugging into ever more facets of our society—it is a project of reshaping the landscape, a blueprint for making the whole world a border.

This is what we are working to document through photography and other modes of study. We recognize, of course, that no photograph can capture infrastructure in all its dimensions; in fact, landscape photography can be a particularly limiting methodology given how much of the systems we study is essentially invisible— increasingly a matter of digital data and algorithmic processes—or at least beyond our field of vision, operating, for example, in the infrared spectral band or at the cruising altitude of a Predator B drone. But to understand border security as infrastructure is also to recognize that however much it is said that border security and surveillance take place in the cloud, these systems will always have a material existence alongside their virtual ones, a point where information and technology meet flesh and bone. And so we will continue to go where these systems take place and where human police continue to hunt, every day, for people and information. And we will continue to seek out ways to collaborate with others who share our vision of the world—not a world striated with walls and dotted with prisons, but a landscape of encounters across difference, where people and ideas move freely.

Dugan Meyer and Colter Thomas

October 2024