At the Mexican border, Felipe Romero Beltrán captures lives on hold

They are victims of the United States' tightening immigration policy. For four years, Colombian Felipe Romero Beltrán has been photographing migrants stranded in Monterrey and all the way to the border, along the Río Bravo.

A long-term project which he has just turned into a book, Bravo (published by Loose Joints), and which he is exhibiting in Barcelona before presenting it at L'Été photographique in Lectoure, in the Gers, in July.

Images that “tell of life on the border, where hope and despondency, stagnation and movement collide,” writes critic Emma Russell in the British magazine Another .

Born in Bogota in 1992, Beltrán is based in Paris and has been commuting to Mexico since 2020. He originally came to photograph friends and acquaintances.

“The project then developed with texts and conversations about living conditions at the border, particularly in relation to the history of Latino migration to the United States,” the photographer tells the British cultural site Dazed .

At that point, Dazed recalls, There is “a tightening of [American] migration policies, increased militarization of borders and changes in the right to asylum.”

“Table, white tablecloth and two chairs. Dominick's living room”.

“The series examines how the lives of migrants have been affected by the policies pursued by

the United States.”

The British cultural site Dazed

“Sofa and table. Rebeca's house”.

“Utensils. Thom's house.”

Curiously, the Rio Bravo, on which Latin American migrants stumble, is the great absentee from the book.

“Over the years,” the Colombian photographer explains to Dazed, “I have become more interested in the landscape that precedes the border, that intermediate place where there is a very particular type of expectation: that of the person who decides not to cross.”

“El Friki's friend and pink wall”.

“I spend a lot of time with people without photographing them, trying to establish connections. Sometimes photography is secondary: it is like a passport to meet people and the environment.

that I question.”

Felipe Romero Beltrán, to the British magazine Another

The book thus presents “portraits staged with images of psychologically charged places: marked landscapes and bare interiors. The austere, pastel-colored rooms he photographs are often devoid of decoration,” analyzes Another.

Beltrán looks at what is “less documented,” Dazed notes: “those who wait to cross and, in many cases, those who ultimately refuse to cross.”

“Grecia Evangelina. Thom's house”.

As Another points out, “as a migrant himself, Beltrán knows what it means to live in a country that is not his own.”

He left Colombia at 19 to study in Argentina before going to work in Palestine, Germany and Spain, then settling in Paris.

“Contrary to the media images of migrant caravans showing an indistinct mass of people crossing the border, those of Beltrán humanize those who have

embarked on this journey.”

Journalist Emma Russell, in the British magazine Another

“Two roosters, white tablecloth”.

Poignant and raw, Felipe Romero Beltrán's images grab the heart without ever giving in to miserabilism.

What makes the Colombian photographer's work so powerful, Emma Russel recalls in Another, is that he "paints portraits of young people who are making the most of their existence between their old life and the new one they don't yet know." —

It will be presented from July 12 to September 21 at The photographic summer of Lectoure (Gers).

More information at this address .