Photographer David Taylor (BFA '89) spends much of his time straddling the border between the United States and Mexicoliterally. Armed with a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation and a partial leave from his day job as a professor at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, he is documenting the hundreds of cast-iron obelisks that mark the 1,400-mile border, as well as the federal agents who patrol it and the migrants, drug smugglers, and gun runners who cross it.

The project, titled "Working the Line," takes Taylor from Texas to the Pacific Ocean, from stark mountain and desert terrain to even starker concrete-block detention cells along the border. It all ties in to his ongoing exploration of the American west, which began when he moved from New England to Oregon in the early 1990s to attend graduate school. "I did that thing that people have done for over a century," Taylor says. "I went west. I got more and more engaged with that metaphor, until it became a central theme for my work."

Among Taylor's projects are photographic installations about the history of the Grand Coulee Dam in Washington state, and a commission to document the work of agents at a U.S. Border Patrol station in Texas. That job led to his current venture as what he calls "kind of an artist-in-residence" with the Border Patrol.

Taylor's trips to the border last anywhere from a day to a couple of weeks. He drives and hikes, mostly alone, to the monuments, and he has shadowed agents out on patrol for hundreds of hours. He has learned that the idea of "frontier" means different things to different people. "In English, it means freedom, independence, self-reliance; it's a place we go to remake ourselves," he says. In Spanish, though, the word "frontera" means not a destination but a line, an edge, a boundary to be negotiated. "The dissonance between these ideas is what makes sparks fly for me," he says.

Despite opposing political viewsTaylor identifies himself as a "knee-jerk liberal"a mutual respect has grown between him and the Border Patrol agents. "I think they feel I'm giving them a fair shake, trying to present their jobs in an evenhanded way," he says. Taylor's father is a pilot who served in the U.S. Marine Corps and his brother is in the Navy; this background gave him "a vocabulary for interacting with the agents," he says. "It made me take a second look." And while their jobs couldn't be more different, Taylor says he and the agents share a common language. "They track people, so they have to be really attuned to the territory around them. They're sensitive to detail and have a highly developed capacity for observation, and that's how we as artists operate all the time."