Borderlands, Resistance and Archival Ethics: Conversations with Laura Saunders

As part of the Chennai Photo Biennale’s series of conversations reflecting on the practices of representation, Suchitra Vijayan spoke with photographer and filmmaker Laura Saunders on 22 April 2021. Working in Southern Arizona and South-West Virginia, Saunders discussed her work on the Mexico-United States of America borderlands, their attendant histories of migration and the narratives of criminality that they engender. The discussion revolved around the construct of the border not only as a political strategy of exclusion, but also as an industry premised on profit. By using the “…old journalistic tactic of ‘follow the money,’” Saunders was able to peel back a seemingly banal reality to reveal the plural and interlaced politics of its functioning, sustenance and resistance from the grassroots.

The border has also resurrected discourses of violence in the Indian subcontinent with the application of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Assam, as well as the Rohingya refugee crisis in Myanmar—both pointing, in no uncertain terms, to the transparent nationalist ideologies (and their backing in capital) used to orchestrate the displacement of certain communities. The question of citizenship rests on evidentiary documents, the absence of which implies total erasure. A consistent pattern of arrests and narratives of “infiltration” consolidate these realities as a constant othering of the migrant body. Central to Laura's work are the communities that undergo the trauma of systemic crises on the ground level.

Concerns were expressed about archives and questions around their proprietorship. Ownership of historical archives—especially those that document violence against the marginalised—is profitable for white bodies. It is an act of theft that repeats itself as a pattern across contexts—perhaps in a colonial iteration of institutional entitlement. The narrative of delinquency that surrounds trespassing also results in a flattening of histories: individuals are collapsed into the singular category of “criminal” through the erasure of their constitutive realities. In the contemporary moment—including the change in the United States of America’s incumbent presidency—acts of migration continue to be vilified, with the use of detention as a means of control. In the South Asian context, journalism has also acquired an intense urgency in light of the unfolding crises in a landscape where documentation is subject to omission and manipulation by the powers that be. The responsibility as well as culpability of the photojournalist, then, becomes all the more potent not only as agents of information, but also in terms of representation as a departure from the historical use of coercive strategies to access people and sites.

Najrin Islam (NI): An interrogation of carceral regulation and dissensus forms the fundamental basis of your work. In what ways does your work examine the border both as a construct and a space that has implications for specific lives?

Laura Saunders (LS): My work has been deeply informed by the historical and political construction of the border itself: looking at water theft through broken treaties, homestead initiatives to forcibly occupy indigenous land and learning about prisoners building early border infrastructure, among other things. I also examine critical policy shifts that implemented concepts like “deterrence,” which strategically made migration at the Southern border of the United States of America dangerous through militarising and patrolling previously safe routes that had been used for years. To me, it very quickly became apparent that the remaking of this region as a site of control through settler-colonial storytelling was essential for the border’s existence and growth.

The relationships I built in Arizona progressed naturally with each trip, offering me the chance to humble my privileged position of an intellectual understanding, and move towards one that began to grow from connections and experiences. I was shown immense generosity from people who were directly impacted by state violence—whether losing loved ones while crossing or to incarceration and the trauma that comes with it. The desert was not just a beautiful landscape bereft of politics, but host to mechanisms of control and a hostile climate and ecosystem that rendered itself inhospitable to the populations that inhabited and traversed it. There is no abstraction when you see how the daily lives of people are impacted through constant surveillance and subjected to checkpoints simply to visit a friend or run an errand.

NI: You have been documenting communities organising against a large fracked gas project, the Mountain Valley Pipeline. How do you look at the crackdown on communities at the grassroots level through the practice of image-making? How are you capturing this resistance to state apparatuses?

LS: Having grown up in South-West Virginia, I was aware that the pipeline had been in discussion for years before people began physically disrupting the project through blockades and peaceful interventions. I also saw that coverage from larger media outlets was absent and that the urgency of local coverage meant that a lot of context was getting lost or ignored due to tight deadlines. It felt (and still feels) very important to me to gather footage and record different aspects of the event and its unfolding—whether it is waiting outside a jail, attending hearings, going to relevant environmental regulatory meetings or being on the frontlines where pipeline workers and police are present. None of these things function in isolation and none of them is in an accidental setting. Each of these places informs the larger understanding of what is happening here—both politically and personally.

Communities in Appalachia have faced economic and environmental exploitation for many years. Most people know this region for its coal production and the consequences of damage that have come from this level of extraction, as well as the devastation left behind when it is no longer profitable. This region is still routinely defined by a loss of autonomy, the natural resources and their relationship to massive corporations who set up systems to make sure they could have cheap labour and control over the mineral wealth. Despite this, it has been extraordinary to see the growth of relationships in the grassroots spaces, where building trust and caring for one another has been the foundation; an absolute contradiction to the idea of any ownership over these mountains. I have been inspired by projects like Appalshop and the Highlander Center and the power of self-directed storytelling in helping affirm perspectives that are too often erased or retold for the benefit of those in power. I am always moving in and out of seeing this work as an archive that lets people feel seen and validated and holds others accountable for what is said in public versus what is happening in these hollers.

NI: You have documented how humanitarian aid for migrants on the borderlands has been criminalised and have even been arrested yourself in 2018 while doing so. How do you view these regulations on the transfer of bodies, images and information on state atrocities across borders?

LS: My arrest took place in West Virginia while documenting the pipeline protest. Being deeply involved in both Southern Arizona and South-West Virginia, the parallels of these environments have become increasingly apparent. The extractive model of environmental economies and the growing profit of criminalising migration are both clear functions of settler colonialism and its need to regulate the people who are used to make these models function—whether it be local individuals who are forced to participate in the eminent domain over indigenous land or the indigenous peoples who are made to qualify their coming and going in spaces where their ancestors lived for centuries. Effectively, these industries hold the most power—they determine where resources are directed and how the land itself will be treated.

The camera can quickly record a scene but this bluntness has a tendency to simplify things that require nuance and complication. At all times, I try to question the image-making process, as it has historically been used as a tool for control, harm, ownership and the perpetuation of white supremacy. I think it is essential to remember this legacy when making images, and to always be in a mindset of disrupting these patterns of power. The disruption may look like refusing the language of dominance and the visuals that uphold it or simply asking questions about whether the image should be made, by whom and why?

NI: You spoke about the question of ownership with regard to archives that carry histories of violence against the vulnerable. What do you think about the insidious intersections and structures of profit, gaze and theft in photojournalism?

LS: There have been a number of recent flash points where this topic has been raised. For instance, there is the issue of archives of enslaved peoples that are legally owned by Harvard University rather than their direct descendants. Another example is VICE’s choice to publish manipulated archive images of prisoners killed by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Or the case of Magnum Photos being called out for having horrific tags and selling explicit images for a profit. In many ways, we are at the very edge of reckoning with these atrocities. The camera has not only functioned as a tool of colonial harm but arguably incentivised a callous way of moving through communities that are not our own. It feels disingenuous to claim that we do not know better by now when there have been so many conversations about how predatory these exchanges can feel.

Common terms like “voice for the voiceless” betray the way dominant cultures assume their right to move through an unknown space with authority rather than humility. People are not voiceless, they are simply not being listened to. There are many people who are challenging this way of working. However, when quick deadlines, rapid news cycles and pages that require heavy traffic for profit are prioritised, it changes the value of what is being done. I hope that those of us—like myself—who exist safely with privilege and the power that comes with it, will constantly question their motives. I try to remind myself all the time that I am only the expert of my own life—not anyone else’s.

To read about the previous conversations in this series, please click here and here.

All images and captions by Laura Saunders.