Program on Public Life

Longing--Personal Effects from the Border

Photographs by Susan Harbage Page on view at the Love House and Hutchins Forum through May 28.
Click here to view images online.

Meet the Artist
Tues., May 20
4-6 p.m.
Stop by the Center to talk with Susan Harbage Page and view her photographs. Refreshments served.

Longing--Personal Effects from the border is an exploration of the possessions left behind by persons unknown who are trying to cross over the Texas border into the Southland from Mexico. Often migrants quickly change from wet clothes into dry clothes and then disappear into the general population, or they are stopped by the police or border guards and asked to empty their pockets of everything nonessential. Abandoned personal items--toothbrushes, wallets, photographs, clothing, combs--become relics or symbols not only of culture but of the homes that are left behind as migrants pass into the American South.

In 2000, I taught photography in a night class to adult ESL learners in Durham, North Carolina. We put a map on the wall and charted the journeys of the Latino class members from their hometowns across South America to their current homes in North Carolina. The visualization of their travels led me to understand that the journey was important, long, and arduous and one with many stops along the way. I had often thought of the U.S.-Mexican border as the finish line, but this experience made me think of it as just one step in a long process and led me to go see the border and experience it for myself. In June of 2007, I walked the border and canoed on the Rio Grande near Brownsville, Texas, and the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge near Alamo, Texas. I photographed the objects as I found them.

--Susan Harbage Page

Images pictured here are "Untitled," Azteca pharmacy, Matamoros, Texas (above) and "Untitled," white shirt, near Brownsville, Texas (below).

This work is supported by a grant from the Center for the Study of the American South, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

All images are dated 2008 from the Longing: Personal Effects from the Border Series. They are archival digital prints.

susanharbagepage@gmail.com