FOREWORD

In this understated and brilliant photographic essay, Gina Hyams captures both the emptiness of the pandemic and its global power. Border Run is not a collection of photojournalists’ work where each picture tells its own single narrative pandemic story. Rather, it is a series of deceptively simple snapshots that capture the repetitive beauties of the road and of the journey from an unprotected Mexican town to the vaccination centers of Laredo, Texas. While we travel this long, hot road, an underlying unstated commentary follows us, elucidating the stark and unavoidable problem of global inequality.

Border Run is not about easily digestible human-interest pandemic stories with beginnings and ends. Instead, with the headlong haste and brutal directedness of an illicit caper, the book captures a pilgrimage of inoculation between two cities—and two countries. Those who have a car and the time, and can afford gas, can travel 22 hours twice to get vaccinated against COVID-19, but they leave the rest behind.

Out the passenger window, the hasty, honest camera opens its eye on the unchanging blue Western sky, beneath which the absence of men and women and the glory of small, bright cantinas and gas stations reminds us that this plague has emptied a world. Yet the lonely asphalt spools out a tale of old connection, as we travel with driver and photographer from south to north and then back again. Border Run is lonely and bright, and the fact that all this mileage finally brought immunity to two Americans in a car only reminds us of all the others around the globe who have no such protection.

–Amy Wilentz, author of Farewell, Fred Voodoo: A Letter From Haiti

Photographs by Gina Hyams
Foreword by Amy Wilentz
Muddy Puppy Media, 2021 (hardcover, 9″ x 12″, 88 pages, signed limited edition of 100)

INTRODUCTION

Spring 2021. My husband and I drove 44 hours to get COVID-19 vaccinations in Texas—making the roundtrip journey from San Miguel de Allende to Laredo twice. I photographed these roadside scenes out the car window with my iPhone while speeding along Highway 57 to and from the border in the states of San Luis Potosí and Coahuila. (Dave did the driving.)

The poignant emptiness of the landscape, humble buildings, and life-affirming pops of bright color moved me. Coming out of a year of pandemic isolation, the repetitive scenery resonated with my interior emotional state. I was also drawn to the humanity of the hand-lettered signs, which contrasted sharply with the corporate logos that dominated strip mall after strip mall north of the border.  

Years ago, I heard a therapist say, “If you’re bored, you’re not paying attention.” While staying home to avoid the virus, I tried to make meaning from that wisdom. I spent the pandemic making a series of photographic “morning compositions” that framed my domestic landscape in new ways—viewing it through a phone camera lens as shapes, lines, layers, textures, and color fields, endeavoring to deeply see and appreciate it.

On the road, I continued photographing with this intent—creatively engaging with the landscape, attempting to distill and reveal it and, in the process, create a portrait of a fraught moment in a timeless place. 

–Gina Hyams