Artist Talk: Lisa Elmaleh

Lisa Elmaleh is a humanitarian and artist whose photography is grounded by years of living and working alongside the communities she photographs. In 2020 she began volunteering with humanitarian aid organizations and living alongside migrants at the Kino Border Initiative and Casa de la Misericordia, two shelters in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico, becoming part of the daily life of the community. Photography grew out of this experience rather than preceding it. Resisting the journalistic gaze, Elmaleh explains that only after immediate needs have been attended to does the camera come out.

Images from the Promised Land / Tierra Prometida series exhibited in Boston College’s chapter of the Vatican commissioned global exhibition, Exercises in Empathy: Accompaniment, emerged in response to the reductive representations of migration circulating through American news. Elmaleh's work insists on a much larger image of human life and the deadly realities on the borderlands, one which records the dignity and resilience of individuals. Every photograph carries a history that exceeds what we can see.