Dreaming Across Borders

For I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours, published by MACK in September 2024, photographers Carolyn Drake and Andres Gonzalez embarked on a collaborative exploration of life along the U.S.–Mexico border from 2018–2023. The five-year project explores the complexities of migration, identity, and human connection in the borderlands. By blending their perspectives, Drake and Gonzalez challenge prevailing narratives about the border as a place of division. The longtime partners instead offer a shared vision of land where cultures, lives, and stories weave together.

Their work, a mix of ad hoc and carefully staged scenes, resists the urge to freeze time or follow a single narrative. They prompt us to reflect on the fluid, nonsingular nature of life at the border, where boundaries are constantly shifting and blurring — politically, culturally, and interpersonally.

The U.S.–Mexico border, stretching almost 2000 miles and home to more than 15 million people, is regularly portrayed in media and politics as a harsh line of separation, a violent place dominated by walls, checkpoints, and militarization. But for Drake and Gonzalez, their experiences traveling along the border revealed a far more nuanced reality.

“During my lifetime, the narrative around the border has been defined by separation and growing militarization,” Gonzalez explained. “But when we arrived and drove along the wall, we heard music coming from homes on the other side, found animal trails crossing over, children going to school on one side and living on the other, [and saw] a robust cross-border economy around second-hand goods.”

This fluidity defies the physical and political barriers imposed by governments. Their photographs capture the everyday lives of people in the borderlands — moments of connection, dissonance, and creativity. Rather than presenting the border as a fixed, divisive line, the images show it as a living, dynamic space where cultures and lives overlap. On the cover and throughout, several images of textiles appear, emphasizing the interwoven nature of life there.

I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours is also an in-depth exploration of partnership and collaboration. Drake and Gonzalez, photographers who’ve been partners for two decades, adapted their practices to work together in a way they hadn’t previously.

“The differing processes we brought with us were more tricky to balance than expected,” Drake said. “Andres likes to work slowly and quietly, while I often have a thousand ideas come at once that I need to sort through. We had to talk through every decision so that we both understood what the plan was.”

These conversations helped the pair reflect on their creative instincts, often habitual or unconscious in solo work, and learn to amalgamate their approaches. This spirit of collaboration extended to the photobook itself, too. They intentionally decided to leave authorship of individual photos and specific locations ambiguous.

“This project was all about leaving room for the other person’s ego or experience to exist alongside our own,” Drake explained. “We had to force ourselves to make only half a picture in the hope that we could eventually combine the two into one. After teaching ourselves to let go of total authorship, it didn’t make sense to go back and point out who made which image. Same with the locations. We wanted to consider the borderlands as borderlands, not as separate countries.”

By sharing authorship and focusing on the borderlands as a unified region, rather than dividing it into “Mexican” or “U.S.” sides, Drake and Gonzalez reinforced themes of interconnection. Both photographers brought their personal experiences with migration to the project. Gonzalez’s family has been migrating from Mexico to California’s Bay Area for 75 years, while Drake’s ancestors traveled west across the United States via the Oregon Trail.

“Both of these histories have informed our sense of self and our ways of relating to others and each other,” Gonzalez reflected. “In a way, we have been working through this narrative for the 20 years we’ve been together.”

While their long-term relationship provided a foundation for collaboration, working in the field together presented challenges. Spending extended time traveling through the borderlands required resolving creative disagreements on the spot.

“When you’re on the road, away from home, spending money for your accommodation every day, there is a time pressure that makes things more intense,” Drake said. “You can’t just take a breather and come back to it later — you have to work it out now.”

Utilizing tools they had developed in their relationship to navigate disagreements, the project forced Drake and Gonzalez to compromise and seek inspiration, even in moments of heightened tension. Taking on someone else’s point of view can be a struggle, but it’s ultimately an exercise in understanding.

“Cameras have only one viewfinder,” Drake noted, describing how the project forced them to adapt a traditionally solo art form into a collaborative practice. “Forcing the medium to be collaborative felt like turning it against itself. But that’s kind of why we did it.”

Reflecting themes of collaboration and fluidity, they organized the photobook into image pairings, which they then proceeded to separate. It resists framing the borderlands as a place defined by a singular narrative. Instead, every potential storyline morphs into another, asking the reader to recognize the inherent incompleteness of a singular perspective.

Unlike conventional documentary photography, which often emphasizes individual “decisive moments,” I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours embraces indeterminacy, ambivalence, and the uncanny. The images don’t attempt to freeze time or place, they instead emphasize movement and change — much like the borderlands themselves. While some projects evolve as the work progresses and new challenges are presented, the intentions for this one were clear early on.

“We knew what we wanted to do from the beginning,” Gonzalez said. “We found specific shooting ideas from the experience of being there and researching on the ground, but there was no one encounter that changed what we wanted to accomplish.”

More than anything, I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours celebrates connection — between two artists, between communities, and across borders. With this collaborative body of work mirroring the shared nature of life in the borderlands, Drake and Gonzalez invite us to reconsider our own assumptions about the region. During their travels, they not only photographed, but listened to the stories of people who were in love, at work, coming of age, driven by faith or tradition, filled with ambition, and maneuvering through life with competing identities. Several of these stories were included in a 2020 article from The California Sunday Magazine.

The photobook’s title was suggested by the artist Bill Beckwith, whom Drake has collaborated with on previous projects. Beckwith created a plaster mold on Jackie’s face in the very memorable mother-daughter image “Jackie and Chloe” from Knit Club, as well as provided a self-portrait in the style of John the Baptist for the cover of Men Untitled.

I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours is a nod to the final line in Bob Dylan’s “Talkin’ World War III Blues” from his second studio album The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. The 1963 song satirizes Cold War paranoia, as well as Americans’ commonly held fears and anxieties about the prospect of a third World War. As the current U.S. President, both political parties, and the media stoke flames of racist, xenophobic hatred by proclaiming migrants and refugees constitute an “invasion” of the U.S.’s southern border, violence and displacement in the name of border “security” become more likely and widespread.

The Dylan lyric, recontextualized, takes on a double meaning for the photobook. The line and book underscore a spirit of reciprocity, openness, and connection despite rampant paranoia and insidious propaganda. Drake and Gonzalez not only imagined, but found, a world where boundaries blur and differences coexist — a place where beauty and love prosper.

Borders aren’t just lines on maps or impermeable structures, but vibrant living spaces ripe with possibility, where cultures collide, adapt, and coexist. For Drake and Gonzalez, the journey to making the book was one of trial and error, overlapping and dissonant perspectives, and perseverance.  I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours provides hope that even in a divided world, connection and creative collaboration can transcend rigid boundaries.

I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours is available to purchase on the Magnum Shop.

On Tuesday, February 11, from 6:00–7:30 p.m., Carolyn Drake and Andres Gonzalez will present I’ll let you be in my dreams if I can be in yours at Public Trust in Philadelphia, PA, as the latest presentation in the series Magnum America/U.S.A.