Through the Lens of Paul Turounet

Wednesday, 01 February 2012 19:10

It's after midnight in the Sonoran Desert and Paul Turounet is filled with curiosity. Thinking about a dream he had shortly before - one where he was isolated, alone and then found - he became inspired to capture the essence of what it is like to be a migrant stuck in the middle of the desert at night.

He sets up his camera on a tripod before lighting up a brush-cave near the U.S.-Mexican border with his flash. He shines a flashlight with a green filter on it, as well as an ambient light before crawling inside the cave.

While lying down, he feels a chill. He reacts by curling into a ball to keep warm. He then falls asleep. Later, he takes a five-minute exposure of the photoshoot to form an original work called "Bajo La Luna Verde," or "Under the Green Moon." It is his longing to understand migrants' perspectives on their journey, as well as document their personal identities, that continues to motivate Turounet to capture and portray undocumented immigrants from Mexico.

Turounet was born in 1962 to parents who were Bank of America employees. He grew up near the San Francisco Bay Area and attended San Jose State University. There, he studied advertising, journalism and poetry. He noted that he also took a photography class while attending the school, but because he couldn't afford supplies, he received a "C."

This experience didn't hinder his interest in photography, though. Shortly after, he enrolled in photography classes at Academy of Art University in San Francisco where he became interested in portraiture, particularly within social-issue contexts. He took photos of people living on the streets of San Francisco, migrant workers living in Sonoma County, as well as runaways in Hollywood.

"I had no interest in using photography in an autobiographical sense, but rather as a means to contemplate those experiences," he said.

In 1993, Turounet was accepted in the graduate photography program at Yale University. As a student, he said his ideas and approaches to photography were "challenged" and "expanded."

"While it was a difficult experience at times, it has been one of the most rewarding," Turounet noted. "It started me on the pathway to where I'm at as a photographer."

But in 1994 Turounet started testing his boundaries.

That year, California passed Proposition 187, also known as "Save Our State." Turounet described the law to be similar to Arizona's current SB-1070. Basically, it allowed the state to screen for citizenship, as well as prohibit undocumented immigrants from health care services, public education, as well as other social services provided by the state and nation. Like SB-1070, this law caused controversy and discussion.

"The discussion of Prop 187 led to my curiosities to explore what was happening on the border," Turounet explained.

So, he headed south to the border.

In Tijuana, near the Pacific Ocean, he took his first photograph of a migrant crossing into the U.S. He explained that he took the migrant's photo with a large positive and negative Polaroid, and then gave the migrant the resulting print. He explained the print served as their "record of that one moment of such significant personal transformation... (of) leaving their sense of home for a new opportunity." He then continued to take several similar photos.

Turounet would later develop his negatives and print them on several steel plates that weighed about 30 pounds each. He would then hang them along the border wall, many at the locations where the photographs were originally taken. Their names would also be carved with each photo so that "each photo will be informed by their own sense of personal identity," he said.

"(They) served not only as signs of respect and as homage to those photographed, but also as spiritual signs for those who would come upon them while making their own enduring journeys," Turounet said.

He would repeat this process again and again for the next several years. In 2004, however, he would follow this process to create one of his famous pieces known as "Estamos Buscando A," or "We're Looking For." It wasn't until 2006 that he completed it, after mounting the photographs on a piece of the border wall that he salvaged from Tijuana. (Part of "Estamos Buscando A" can be found at the University of Arizona's Museum of Art within exhibit "The Border Project: Soundscapes, Landscapes and Lifescapes.")

"I'm interested in tapping into a viewer's psychology and (the) interpretation of the migrant experience, (making it) universal to all of us: the search for something in life and what people are willing to do for those possibilities," Turounet said about the general theme of his work, especially "Estamos Buscando A." 

Currently, Turounet is an associate professor of art and photography at Grossmont College in El Cajon, Calif. He is also working on two projects. One of them involves returning to Tijuana, where he photographed his first migrant. He said the wall was replaced within the last month, so he hopes to mount the original photo of the migrant on the new boundary. 

"While I understand the work (I do) can lead to the larger and familiar discourse of border politics, it is my intention for the viewer to experience a contemplative moment that the migrants have an identity and are just not a statistic," he said.

(For my personal reaction to “Estamos Buscando A” and for more of Turounet’s explanation on the piece, visit my blog, "The Border Project.")

Written by Melissa Guz