In American English, “frontier” calls to mind opportunity, myth and adventure. But “frontera,” in Spanish, has a different sense. It is the limit, the edge and the border.  “Linguistically, it’s a head-on collision,” said David Taylor, who has spent four years along the international border photographing a project he calls “Working the Line.”  The frontier is subject and studio for Mr. Taylor, who lives in Las Cruces, N.M., not far from the sister cities of El Paso, Tex., and Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico. In the course of his broad exploration of border issues, he set out to photograph 276 obelisk monuments, most erected in the 1890s, that demarcate the international boundary west of El Paso. (To the east, the Rio Grande serves that role.)  He received a Guggenheim fellowship in 2008 and approached the project with an ethnographer’s mind. He also discovered — about halfway through — an allegiance between his work and a series of photographs taken in the 1980s by Robert R. Humphrey, a botanist, to document changes in vegetation along the border.  Though dwarfed in context, each monument has its own story. In Nogales, Ariz., for instance, Mr. Taylor had to get through a chain-link fence to photograph an obelisk. He was helped through by two youths who told him how they passed drugs over the border. Because the area was not under police patrol, Mr. Taylor realized that he was at their mercy.  He is now down to his last two dozen obelisks. Mr. Taylor hopes to complete the project by the fall, creating a catalog of objects that are so simple yet so tied up with ideas of national identity, conquest and desperation.
Standing alone in vast landscapes, the obelisk monuments photographed by David Taylor all have stories to tell about the border with Mexico.