MARFA — Local photographer Nina Dietzel will have a series of eight photographs titled Borderlands on display at Garza Marfa, 124 Highland St., for three months starting this Saturday, March 9.
Borderlands is a series of thermal images that reframes the cultural understanding of borders as sites of surveillance by focusing instead on the intrinsic character of the landscapes along the U.S. and Mexico divide near Marfa, where Dietzel is based.
“I spend much time exploring the Big Bend and often find myself along the Rio Grande, our border with Mexico,” Dietzel said. “I have a deep appreciation for our stark desert landscape, where nature is as present as Border Patrol.”
Each image was created with a thermal camera, which detects temperature. Warmer colors reflect anything that produces heat, typically people or animals. Thermal technology is used by the U.S. Border Patrol and has visual associations with monitoring activity and capture. Reinforced by video games, movies and other visual media, we are conditioned to assume that what’s revealed in these types of images reads as a target meant to be caught.
As a result, even under less provocative circumstances — an amateur wildlife enthusiast hoping to catch a coyote wandering by, or a firefighter assessing the path of a growing wildfire — thermal images often evoke an uneasy quality, evidence that something is not quite right.
“Artists and photographers often process their experiences through their work,” Dietzel said. “When I learned that Border Patrol uses thermal cameras for surveillance, I thought why not hijack this very technology for a completely different effort: make art to emphasize and share my love for the landscape of the borderlands instead.”
Subverting the surveillance purpose of this technology, Dietzel intentionally shifts the viewer’s attention to focus on objects in this borderlands environment that the camera wasn’t designed to pick up — and that we don’t expect to see: a pair of horses grazing in the sun, a looming water tower, the linear lines of train tracks, or the fan-like leaves of a desert yucca or agave plant.
“My hope is that this twist — ’stealing’ technology for something it wasn’t designed for in the first place — brings a smile to people, and lets them perhaps ‘see’ differently,” Dietzel said.
Rendered in bright, almost neon gradations of yellow, orange, red, blue and purple, these unimposing and still parts of the borderlands landscape ask us to consider a different viewpoint and explore the place without a finite, utilitarian, or human-prescribed purpose. Warmer tones aren’t only indicative of human activity but of other forms of life. If borders are human-imposed boundaries that anticipate disobedience, the objects, flora and fauna that surround them operate in a distinct reality; they aren’t political and have nothing to prove.
While Marfa is home to many creative interventions by well-known cultural producers and artists, Dietzel’s work reminds us there are always undiscovered or latent layers to understanding and experiencing a place — and that places are never what they seem on the surface.
One of the Borderlands series images of the John Chamberlain building in Marfa won the Grand Prize from an international open call “The Colors of the Commonplace,” New York Center for Photographic Art, last week.
For more information, visit ninadietzel.photofolio.com.