Desire Lines traces movements old and new across the desert landscape of the U.S.-Mexico Sonoran borderlands: the paths taken by migrants and border agents, missionaries and conquistadors, indigenous peoples and industrialists. The messy and sometimes violent collision of peoples has created a region that defies the simplistic and damaging narratives so often attributed to our borders.
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\nShipley’s photographs focus on the disorienting experience of this landscape – a place of beauty or danger depending on the perspective of those who pass through it. Deceptively empty, the landscape is constantly surveilled and controlled, with an ever-increasing military presence infiltrating the lives of the people in the surrounding communities.
