"TIJUANA, Mexico - "Poor Mexico," goes a popular Mexican saying, "so far from God, so close to the United States." It's an expression that goes double for Tijuana, the buzzing Mexican border city where English is as present as Spanish and curio shops sell ponchos with logos of US sports teams. A favorite pastime on both sides of the border is to dismiss Tijuana as too American to be Mexican, too Mexican to be the United States."
"And while you won't find people in her images, you will encounter the vagaries of the human condition. A photograph from Outdoor, for example, reveals a small, self-built dwelling meticulously constructed out of old garage doors. The doors hail from the US - recycled construction materials that regularly arrive from well-to-do San Diego to the north. In Tijuana's impoverished districts, US waste finds new life as somebody's home."
Ingrid Hernández's long-running photographic work focuses on Tijuana's asentamientos (squatter settlements) and their material and social traces. An exhibition at Centro Cultural Tijuana, Ingrid Hernández: 20 años de arte Under Construction, presents 13 photographic series including Outdoor (2003–4) and projects made in the United States and Colombia. For more than two decades Hernández has trained her camera on neighborhoods where great wealth collides with great poverty. Her images omit people but reveal the vagaries of the human condition through built structures and discarded materials. Reused US construction materials, such as garage doors, become self-built homes, illustrating a complex, symbiotic US–Mexico relationship and an empathetic portrait of the city.
Read at Hyperallergic
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