Justice

Photographing the U.S.-Mexico Border Fence

Ignacio Evangelista's "The Line on the Map" captures the stark, literal division between nations.
The U.S.-Mexico border fence in Tijuana.Ignacio Evangelista

Ski lifts in the height of summer, a concrete zoo habitat with a smattering of plants: It is disquieting when human constructions clash with nature. Nature does not have intentions. The manmade does, and it can’t hide them.

The Spanish photographer Ignacio Evangelista has made a career out of framing these unsettling contrasts. In the past few years, he’s aimed his camera at the artifice of national borders. “After Schengen,” featured on CityLab in 2014, captured nature’s takeover of European border checkpoints following their abandonment after the 1995 Schengen treaty.