Bill McLaughlin is a self-taught painter and photographer living and working in Chenango County.

Artist Statement

My work as a visual artist has mostly expressed itself in my relationship to Nature and the land on which I live.

Several years ago while working on a project of monochrome landscape photographs of central New York, I gradually began adding portraits of the people I encountered while exploring locations to photograph.

It was during that time that I once again fell in love with the power of the portrait. The magical give and take between subject and photographer, the frozen moment, the direct gaze of a person caught momentarily off guard and voluntarily vulnerable-it was a harvest from the land I had not anticipated.

In 2019, as the situation on the southern border worsened and the full scope of the humanitarian crisis became apparent I was dismayed by the photographs I was seeing of the migrants and asylum seekers. They were portrayed as dangerous and desperate, like an enemy, dehumanized.

Then one day I saw the photograph of Salvadoran Oscar Alberto Martinez Ramirez and his 23- month-old daughter, Valeria, lying face down in the muddy waters of the Rio Grande, drowned together as they tried to cross to safety.

Still enamored of the power I had found in those portraits made close to home, I resolved to visit the border and attempt to make portraits that would tell a more honest and humanitarian story, to make portraits with dignity and respect.

My hope was that bringing these images back from the border and exhibiting them in a large format in our communities would help de-otherize these people who have risked so much and have come so far. If we can see ourselves - our hopes, our dreams, our fears - in them, then this project will have been a success.

Meanwhile, they wait. They wait on politicians. They wait on a deadly pandemic. They wait on diminishing resources and yet more charity. They wait while growing extremes of indifference and animosity further endangers them. They wait as their children grow older in shelters. And even now, more than two years since my visit, they wait.

To help advocate for human rights, immigration reform, social justice with a special focus on issues related to the US/Mexican border, contact: BORDER ANGELS at www.borderangels.com