This project explores Mexico over the last thirty years by highlighting the challenges and beauty of life just south of the border. Collectively, the photographs invite dialogue between Mexico and the United States as viewers on both sides may recognize something of themselves in the pictures.

The photographs in Home Fires, Volume I: The Past were taken during the height of a crippling drought in the state of California. Bruce Haley, known for his hard-hitting war and documentary work, turns his camera homeward, to the agriculture-rich San Joaquin Valley where he spent his childhood. The resulting images, haunting and melancholy, play out against the larger framework of contentious water politics and land use issues. The writer Kirsten Rian provides the accompanying text.