Crossings

About The Exhibition

Belfast Exposed launched its new 2006 gallery programme with an exhibition by noted Magnum photographer Alex Webb. For the past 25 years Webb has been documenting the narrow strip of land between the United States-Mexico borders, here cultural differences between the two countries are blurred and a atomsphere of transience and crossings dominates. In this exhibition his complex and poignant images capture the humor, pathos, paradox and tragedy of life in a place of perpetual flux, transience and volatility. Photographing primarily in the streets, Webb vividly captures the physical, cultural, economic and symbolic "crossings" or passages that continually blur the lines of demarcation between the two countries. The cross-migration and overlaying of peoples, ideas, beliefs and systems within border zones is a subject that Webb has explored throughout his career.

"I first went to the border in 1975. I worked in black and white then; now I work in colour. My initial fascination with the world of illegal border crossers has expanded to include many other kinds of crossings-cultural, economic, spiritual - Halloween festivities in Mexico, charro celebrations in the United States, U.S college spring breakers in Mexico, Mexican shoppers in the U.S. Culturally interwoven, it is this U.S-Mexico borderland that has come to fascinate me, almost a third country unto itself that is brutally divided-by a river, a fence, a wire - and yet somehow is also one." - Alex Webb