For the last five years, photographers and longtime partners Carolyn Drake and Andres Gonzalez have traversed the border between Mexico and the United States, working together for the first time. The result, “I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours,” is a complex yet tender rumination on the human connection, migration and the mechanics of photography itself. While the collaboration might sound poetic, the reality was anything but comfortable. Drake and Gonzalez tell writer Gem Fletcher how, as they studied the borderlands, they were faced with an unavoidable reckoning that, over time, offered them a deeper understanding of each other and their work.
“I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours” is available to buy from MACK books.
Carolyn Drake and Andres Gonzalez—two highly-acclaimed, independent visual artists who also happen to be life partners—have spent their careers exploring the shifting political, social and geographical landscapes of our world. While their lives are inextricably intertwined, their artistic practices remain utterly distinct. Gonzalez’s work resides in the journalistic, while Drake is focused on collapsing the traditional divides between author and subject, as well as the real and the imaginary. Gonzalez prefers to keep his work private while it’s in progress, avoiding external influence, while Drake loves sharing and garnering feedback. In many ways, he is the yin to her yang, so when they decided to collaborate for the first time, the process was anything but straightforward.
“There are so many times when I just wanted to quit this project,” Gonzalez tells me. “At one point, we wanted to call the project ‘The Argument,’” says Drake, laughing. “That’s something we both agree was part of the work.”
She explains, “To get the right picture, you might have to get in the other person’s way. One of us would be really into the shoot, and the other one would be really frustrated, and vice versa.” Gonzalez adds, “Ultimately, our tension somehow fueled the creative process. Nothing was ever static or sterile. We were always energized by emotion, whether frustration or giddiness about a situation. Somehow, that dynamic became this hybrid work where we were both engaged differently.”
Interestingly, Drake and Gonzalez’s collaboration wasn’t planned. In 2018, they were both finishing up their own personal projects and looking for something new when a group of Magnum photographers, including Drake, were offered a small grant to make work about the border between the United States and Mexico.
“I knew immediately that I wasn’t going to go to the border unless Andres was involved,” explains Drake. “We have this cultural border that exists within our relationship. We both have migration stories that make our families completely different cultures within themselves. Andres’ extended family migrated from Mexico to California over a period of decades, settling in the San Francisco Bay Area.” Gonzalez adds, “Carolyn has roots in European farmers who migrated west along the Oregon trail in the 19th century and had recently surfaced a diary from one of her ancestors.”
For years Gonzalez had been encouraged by curators and editors to make work about his Mexican-American family history, but resisted. He felt it became unavoidable when the border became increasingly militarized in 2016. “We began seeing children getting separated from their parents at the border and kept in cages,” says Gonzalez. “We wanted to express feelings about the politics of the moment while also exploring the fluidity of life along the borderlands.”
The result is a series of uncanny diptychs created in towns on both sides of the border that traverse the very tip of the gulf in San Diego through Arizona, New Mexico and Texas. Frames are fractured, shot from alternative perspectives or focus on different elements within the scene. The duo never disclose the exact location or who shot which image and this deliberate vagueness enables the viewer to move forward and backwards through space and time, defying the limitations of the medium through an abundance of multiplicity.
“A big part of our decision to work together was about trying to challenge the problematic idea in photography of the singular narrative,” explains Gonzalez. “We wanted to push back against the idea that an image can define reality or the truth. When we think about the border and who controls it, using us as surrogates for the two sides felt like a way to challenge these conventions.”
Drake continues: “We have a tendency to speak for each other, which also became part of this, exploring what it means to tell your own story versus telling another person’s story and the ethics of that.”
The project is full of strange details: a young woman at the car wash in clown makeup, a muscular figure wading thigh-deep in the water holding a strawberry-topped cake or an umbrella levitating against a chain link fence. Throughout the series, people and objects are constantly in motion, connected through a color story and a recurring circle motif that builds a sense of rhythm among the mystery. In a knowing wink to the viewer, the artists both appear as protagonists and leave their lighting in some frames breaking the fourth wall and playing with the artifice of photography. These unexpected and, at times, eccentric perspectives elicit a tenderness—a greater awareness of the act of looking—challenging our expectations of both the border and the role photography plays in our lives.
“We are both completely different photographers,” asserts Drake as we end our conversation. “And yet, we wanted to try and see the same thing.” Gonzalez continues, “While we have very independent ideas about this work, it became clear that if we put too much of our individual selves into the work, there would be too much of a clash. We both tend to get very critical and dark, but a byproduct of working together unveiled something more tender. A different side to image-making that we are not used to.” Drake jumps in to finish: “We were pulling each other toward our own interests, and in doing that, we found a new middle, and the project became less dark and more of a love story.”