A Reckoning at the Frontier

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Mexico's northern borderlands have a dry, rugged feel in Eros Hoagland's photographs - bathed in hot, pale light, with details emerging from the sepia-toned shadows. From quiet moments of mourning and foreboding to wide vistas of a landscape that has challenged generations, he purposely chose this arid palette to illustrate how the drug war has played out along the border.

He acknowledges that he was influenced by the look of the movie “Traffic.” But what he really wanted was the feel - in both his pictures and, more important, among viewers whose emotions have been numbed by the flood of graphic images from the lingering conflict.

“I wanted to develop my own desert look,” said Mr. Hoagland, 43. “I was unsure how the journalistic community would take it. It was a form of manipulation. They'd say, ‘That's not how things look.' But to me, the way things felt kind of trumped that concern.”

Those feelings - haunting, lonely and heartbreaking - suffuse the images in “Reckoning at the Frontier,” a result of his seven years of photographing in and around the border cities of Tijuana and Ciudad Juarez. He intends to publish a book of those images, financed through a Kickstarter campaign that ends this month. His work along the border is also the subject of “Witness: Juarez,” the ini tial installment of an HBO documentary series about conflict photography.

“These people and places are so familiar to us,” Mr. Hoagland said. “We have such an intercambio with Mexico. It's not some far-off exotic conflict in Africa, and yet people can't relate to it very well. It's on our doorstep. We share our country with them. We vacation there. I wanted to put a sense of place to the news headlines.”

Having started in photojournalism in 1993, he tried early on to do a border series, but whether it was because he was green or lacked a solid vision, the project never gelled. Professionally, he followed a path familiar to his generation, working in El Salvador, Colombia and Mexico, as well as in Iraq and Afghanistan.

He returned to Mexico in 2005, photographing whatever caught his attention within a mile of the border. He showed some of his initial work to Susan Meiselas, who encouraged him.

“I thought it was important for him to dig into o ne place that could be his own,” Ms. Meiselas said. “I think the danger for a lot of young photographers is they move around lots of places and don't get to know any place well. What I was feeling - not just seeing - was it was a place he had some real kinship to, rather than a place he just passes through.”

Eros Hoagland Members of a Juarez church group sometimes dress up like angels to protest the city's violence.

Over the period of his project, Mr. Hoagland's attention shifted from immigration and people-smuggling to out-of-control violence of the drug wars, where it is sometimes hard to tell the good guys from the bad. He made that conflict the focus of his project, though keeping the other visual elements that had draw n him to the region.

“It all felt pretty organic,” said Mr. Hoagland, who lives in Tijuana. “I was still interested in the land itself, the geography and how the geography plays into all the politics going on there. You're butting up against the U.S. There's something about this harsh land where over the generations people have somehow eked out a living.”

His palette - warm, desaturated and high contrast - was one way he tried to convey the gritty and unforgiving emotional feel. So, too, was the distance he kept in some shots. It reflected the emotional distance he encountered among his subjects, who were cautious, if not paranoid, and for good reason.

“One of the themes running through my head is everyone is scared, no one knows who anybody is,” he said. “I wanted to convey that with the actual physical distance. Like you're not supposed to be there. Like I'm not supposed to be there.”

There is a searing moment in “Witness: Juarez† in which that sentiment resounds stunningly. Mr. Hoagland and a Mexican colleague respond to the scene of a triple homicide, where a mother sobs for her dead son. A man in the crowd urges him to leave the woman alone.

“Respect the pain, my friend,” the man says. “Would you like your kids to be killed also?”

“I know what it feels like,” Mr. Hoagland replies. As he walks off into the night and back to his car, he mutters to himself. “Don't tell me I don't know what it feels like. … There were cameras all over my dad's funeral, too.”

His father was John Hoagland, a photojournalist who was killed in 1984 while covering the civil war in El Salvador for Newsweek. His son recalled in the documentary the counsel his mother, Nancy, gave him when his father's death drew international news media attention.

“Don't get mad, Son,” he recalled her saying. “They're just doing their job, just like your dad did.”

Doing that job has bec ome increasingly difficult in places like Mexico, where journalists face terrifying levels of violence and intimidation. He credits Mexican colleagues like Julian Cardona with helping him learn how to read - and feel - a crime scene, knowing when it's O.K. to shoot or better to leave.

To some extent, Mr. Hoagland knew that already from his father's fate.

“I realized how quickly you can get zapped out there,” he said. “It made me really cautious. I don't run into things. I walk in and figure things out.”

That back story informs his images, said David Frankham, the co-executive producer of “Witness” with Michael Mann.

“He relates on a human level,” Mr. Frankham said. “He's not just there taking pictures, for the visuals. He relates to the struggle and to the pain. It's visual information and also emotion. It's both. It's the external and the internal. He's very strong and holds a lot in. But you feel it in his work.”

Although h e said his own loss could never compare with what others in El Salvador or Mexico have endured, Mr. Hoagland said it gave him a bond of sorts with his subjects.

“I've found this common ground trying to deal with people's pain because I've been dealing with the pain for years,” he said. “It helps me not to get too sentimental or caught up in death. My mom for years was a hospice nurse, and I talked to her about these things. It's always been there in my life, dealing with death. That's the way of things. People die. It can be sad and heartbreaking. And life goes on.”

Eros Hoagland An altar's shadow near a highway that is often used to ship drugs to and from Tijuana, Mexico.

Follow Eros Hoagland, handle @GueroFantasma , David Gonzalez - @dgbxny - and @nytimesphoto on Twitter.