Whilst documenting the landscape of the USA Mexico border for some years (see La Linea) it became a frequent occurrence to come into contact with migrants on their journey north of the border. For many this journey ends with apprehension by the US authorities and deportation back to Mexico and beyond. Often exhausted, without money or possessions, these migrants are processed and transported to an official crossing and escorted to the other side. A few are offered modest help in the form of clothing and food by humanitarian charities. Photographed in Northern Mexico.

Las Vegas (The Meadows) sits nestled in the Mohave Desert. Barely a hundred years have seen this tiny Mormon mission post swell into a city of two million people. Think of this place and you will no doubt picture the grandiose hotel casinos and all their trappings. Yet there is another Las Vegas; out there at it’s edge, where its ceaseless expansion encroaches on the yielding arid land, attempting to swallow up the vast desert that surrounds it.
The building boom of the 2000’s made Las Vegas one of the fastest growing cities in the USA with over forty per cent growth in 10 years. This created an insatiable appetite for new homes for people migrating here from all over the country. Developers met this demand by creating master planned communities, gated estates, country clubs, and recreational spaces. All with improbable sounding names; Tuscan Hills, Sienna Heights, Renaissance Manor…

For a short while the desert could sleep as the onslaught of this modern American suburban utopia took a break. However Las Vegas is booming once more and well on its way to becoming Americas hottest city as climate change takes hold.

Two thousand miles of common border separates the USA from Mexico, running between the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of Mexico, traversing four US and six Mexican states. More than just a boundary, the line represents a division between first and third world, slicing the landscape abruptly in towns and cities, and anonymously and silently in the vast empty deserts.

The crossing of this line carries the hopes of some half a million migrants, who make the journey every year heading north looking for the American dream.

This collection of photographs document the line in many of its forms, from the urban fortresses to the rurally benign. Much has already been documented of the human plight in relation to this land. My interest lay in the division of two distinct societies bisected by something as simple in parts as only a line on a map.

Work on this project began in 2001 and some 25,000 road miles later the border and this project continue to evolve.

These photographs represent a selection of the work.

A sea of plastic greenhouses, visible by the naked eye from space. Occupying the arid lands of Almeria. Covering over 100,000 acres for the production of much of Europe’s fruit and vegetables. North African migrants toil in temperatures in excess of 50 degrees.