Críticas Magazine

Bruce Jensen

92 disposable cameras + lots of 5th graders = 'Life in a Border Town'
June 23, 2008

A few minutes south of here on the other bank the Rio Grande is Reynosa,  Tamaulipas, with a half-million people and growing fast.  Its population has doubled in the past couple decades.

Last fall two U.S. artists launched a project to gather portraits of Reynosa.  Both are photographers, but they didn't take a single picture.  Instead David Freeman and Jonathan Searfoss found a way to put cameras in the hands of some real insiders: the city's kids.

Yesterday the local paper told the story in "Reynosa through its children's eyes": 

Together they aimed to capture the most intimate moments of life on the U.S.-Mexico border, but their graying beards and conspicuous light complexions turned out to be too great an obstacle. 

Instead, they employed the eyes and hands of children to shape their vision.

The men passed out 92 disposable Kodak cameras to students at Felipe Carillo Puerto primary school. Searfoss gave the children a photography lesson, a booklet on how to use the cameras and a list of 10 items to capture. He returned weeks later and collected the cameras.

The print edition's nice color spread is lost on the Monitor's website, but you can see selected photos by the fifth graders on the Life in a Border Town website.

Professor Freeman teaches at the community college where I work.  He pours tremendous energy into putting amazing art exhibits in our libraries—and beyond: in 2006 he got the agitprop work of college photography students blown up a thousand times and displayed on 10 local billboards.  An article at the time accurately called him "a socially conscious artist with a keen understanding that the public is a necessary spectator for art that intends to foster a social reaction."

The Life in a Border Town photos are slated to show up in San Antonio soon, but Freeman and Searfoss would like them to be seen even farther north than that.  Interested?  You can contact them via the project's website.

Posted by Bruce Jensen on June 23, 2008 | Comments (0)