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Hidden in plain sight reviews8/11/2023 Sherif's goal with his photos, and the book as a whole, was to complete a portrait of the fence and push it into public view. To accent the brutality of the fence, Sherif shot in the hard light of noon and developed his negatives in quadratone, a four-color printing technique that brings out the metallic luster of all those padlocks, I-beams and bulldozers. The second volume contains Sherif's stark, black-and-white photographs arranged in geographic order, from San Diego on the Pacific, to the mouth of the Rio Grande on the Gulf of Mexico, accompanied by maps of the wall's construction. Gilman outlines the legal framework that has allowed two different Homeland Security secretaries to waive dozens of laws while building the wall, all too often at the expense of endangered species habitat, Native American sacred sites and low-income neighborhoods bisected by the construction. border policy, and an effective piece by Denise Gilman, a professor at the University of Texas Law School. Among other valuable contributions, there's an engrossing timeline covering 40 years of U.S. One volume consists of essays by anthropologists, lawyers, writers and activists who've studied the fence or fought against its construction. Now he's collected his work in a production that's part photojournalism, part activism, part display piece. A French fine art photographer, he says he began "stalking" the fence in Nogales, Ariz., six years ago. But since the fence is deployed in segments across more than 650 miles of largely rural terrain, most Americans have yet to glimpse it, let alone assemble a sense of the thing as a whole. Since then, the wall has been built and rebuilt in a patchwork of styles ranging from Normandy-esque vehicle barricades to metal pillars 20 feet tall. Construction ramped up in the wake of the Secure Fence Act of 2006. The full extent of the barrier can be tough to grasp. But largely because of its format, The American Wall offers readers a rare perspective onto a piece of public infrastructure that has generally defied such a panoptic view. Heft one onto a table and if you don't strain your back, you'll struggle to make out the distant text at the top of a page. The "book" is actually two giant volumes enclosed in a slipcase. In its ungainly proportions, Maurice Sherif's The American Wall mimics its massive subject, the U.S.-Mexico border fence. The American Wall: From the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of MexicoĢ24 + 160 pages, two volumes, hardcover: $150.
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