About

Paul Turounet (b. 1962 and raised in the San Francisco Bay Area) is an interdisciplinary artist working with photography, books and installation. Using his own photographs, archived images and ephemera, text, and found materials, his practice is described as subjective documentary narratives that are informed by individual and collective histories as well as contemporary concerns, exploring such themes as identity, loss, culture, memory, time and place.

He received his MFA in Photography from the Yale University School of Art in 1995. For the following fifteen years, he photographed in Mexico along the U.S. - Mexico border, for which he was awarded a Fulbright-Garcia Robles Fellowship in 1997 and grants from the Trans-Border Institute in 2003 and 2004.

This work, including Estamos Buscando A, Bajo La Luna Verde and Tierra Brava, considers the psychology and culture of the U.S - Mexico border exclusively in Mexico and has been featured in various solo installations and group exhibitions in both the United States and Mexico, including the constructing of a 60-foot long x 12-foot high border wall at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Tucson, Arizona in 2017 with sections of the original wall from the Tijuana-San Diego border sector.

His 2016 self-published book, Estamos Buscando A, was shortlisted and a runner-up for the 2016 Paris Photo - Aperture Foundation First PhotoBook Award, and was included on the New York Times - The Best Photo Books of 2016.