Persia Campbell : Fronteriza

Persia Campbell: Fronteriza

The inextricable tension of the border between Mexico and the USA is the leitmotif of Persia's staged photography, winner of the International Photography Award NYC 2020.

In this new body of work, Persia continues her exploration of staged photography with a harsh light—that of her native Ciudad Juárez— to blind the squalor of the American Way of Life present in its advertising, its plastic diners, its synthetic flowers.

In Persia's second solo exhibition at ALMANAQUE-fotográfica, we find the vignettes of the environment that constitute the identity of a certain border woman, whose identity is perhaps natural, stereotypical, imposed, aspirational or simply inevitable?

The exhibition Persia Campbell  Fronteriza features images from her most recent series, Liminal Spaces; a reflection on the constant existential alienation between Ciudad Juárez and El Paso, Texas, a limbo that is also the center of the Compass Rose of the north, south, east, and west of both countries as the vortex where the vacuous Anglo-Saxon aesthetic collides with the variegated Mexican culture.

Persia’s border is drawn with blocks of color and chiaroscuros to mark that Verde-bandera color is not Navy blue, and that the concept of homeland is disoriented by the daily crossing of the threshold between what is constantly passing or is about to arrive. It seems as if Campbell whispers to us that to find our way today, border women on both sides can entrust themselves to Mexican saints, even if they are atheists. 

Reminiscent of the American photography of Lee Friedlander, Stephen Shore, and William Eggleston, as well as Mexican pulp fiction such as Libro Vaquero, Persia's visual language evokes, in another sense—a feminine one—Jean Cocteau's The Human Voice: the monologue in which a woman speaks on the phone with her lover, unable to communicate because of constant interference on the other end.

At a historical moment when countries seem to be closing in and borders are intensifying, Campbell's work is a border woman's attempt to build bridges across divisions. An invitation to reconcile with the other side.