Lisa Elmaleh Artist Talk

Promised Land/ Tierra Prometida is a photographic body of work I have been developing since 2020. This project was inspired by and in contrast to the visual culture and discourse circulating about immigration in mainstream media. The rhetoric about the wall catalyzed this inquiry, propelling me to travel along the U.S-Mexico border to document and volunteer with humanitarian aid organizations like the Kino Border Initiative and Casa de la Misericordia in Nogales, Sonora, MX, Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley in McAllen, TX, and Aguilas del Desierto in Ajo, AZ. Promised Land interrogates the myth of the American Dream from the perspective of the borderland environs, the people seeking asylum in the United States, and the volunteers and groups who are engaged in helping migrants with vital needs such as food, shelter, health care, as well as facilitating search and rescue in the desert.

In my work as a documentarian, I am continually asking and exploring questions about how to convey a sense of both empathy and urgency in the photographs. My intent is to communicate the necessity for compassion. The large format 8x10 camera is entirely relevant: the time it takes to set up and make a photograph allows for conversation and collaboration with the person, or people, sitting in front of my camera. I hear stories and make personal connections with the people I am photographing. In a digital age, my analog images offer counter narratives to how the media depicts migration by humanizing through imagery. At the heart of it, migration is one chapter of a person's story; it is not their entire story.

Lisa Elmaleh has been awarded a 2024 Guggenheim Fellowship. This prestigious fellowship is awarded on the basis of prior career achievement and exceptional promise. This life-changing recognition is well-deserved, as Lisa Elmaleh has devoted her life to pursuing excellence in the field of photography. Lisa Elmaleh's work has been exhibited in the US and internationally. Her work has appeared in Harper's, Garden and Gun, National Geographic, Smithsonian Magazine, and the New York Times, and her book, Everglades, was published in 2016.