Estamos Buscando A navigates a personal exploration into the migrant experience along the U.S.-Mexico border region in the early 2000's, with a series of intimate portraits, landscape photographs, illustrations, maps, advisories and personal narratives. The book has been designed to reference the migrant safety guides that were given to migrants by Grupos Beta and the Instituto Nacional de Migración of the Mexican government.which works for the protection and defense of human rights of migrants on Mexico's northern and southern borders, through support actions such as search and rescue, humanitarian assistance, legal advice and guidance.
51 photographs + 8 illustrations
Illustrations by Tim Schafer
10-1/2 x 14-1/2 inch folded map
6 x 5 inch aluminum plate in a folder – Limited and Special Editions
Spanish and English
Edition: 140
100 - Trade
25 – Limited Edition (Book + Aluminum Plate)
15 – Special Edition (Book + Postcard Set + Aluminum Plate)
Shortlisted and Runner-Up for 2016 Paris Photo - Aperture Foundation First PhotoBook Award
New York Times - The Best Photo Books of 2016
Humble Arts Foundation - the 17 Best Socially Concerned Photobooks of 2016
Estamos Buscando A (We’re Looking For) is an account of the human cost of the various impediments — walls, fences and natural features — along the Mexico-United States border. In this sense, it is similar to Misrach’s “Border Cantos.” But Turounet’s little book shows things largely from the Mexican side, mostly in Sonora, which borders Arizona. It features a number of portraits of migrants or would-be migrants and written accounts of what the photographer himself saw over many years of studying their crossings. The book, with text in Spanish and English, is ingeniously put together in the form of a guidebook, the kind of thing an NGO or government might issue to people thinking of walking across. The text warns them not to do it, counseling them, instead, to seek legal means of entry. But, wise to human obstinacy and desperation, it also offers them advice on how to proceed if they must, whom to avoid, how to prevent heat stroke and so on. Alongside Turounet’s photographs are a number of illustrations by Tim Schafer. It all makes for an unforgettable act of witness in a compact package.
– Teju Cole, The Best Photo Books of 2016, New York Times