In the photographs of Alex Turner’s Blind River, diaphanous strands of silver and grey stretch across voids of black. In some images, these strands coalesce into an identifiable object: a pair of foxes walking along an access road, a man leading a package-laden horse, a gaping hole in the earth. In others, the forms blur into a mass that borders on the unidentifiable, as outlines of humans and animals merge into a shimmering mist that weaves through the navigable elements of the landscape.

In stark contrast to these forms are the fine-lined green boxes overlaid onto the images. Generated by an artificial intelligence program, each box encircles the forms in the photo, labeling them with their predicted subject and the program’s degree of certainty: vehicle_24%, wht_tl_deer_95%, human_68%. The resulting juxtaposition is striking, as the algorithm’s overlay defines and categorizes discrete figures that, in other photographs, blur into an unquantifiable mass that evades the AI’s gaze.

Working in concert with a scientific research team on the U.S.-Mexico border, Turner creates these images using photographic tools typically intended to observe endangered species. Yet the technology has much in common with the imaging equipment used by the U.S. Border Patrol, in a confluence of photography and AI that has transformed the southwestern desert into a heavily surveilled landscape. By employing these tools to photograph the movements of people and animals across the border, Turner not only calls attention to the narratives around such contested spaces, but also to photography’s role in propping them up.

Many of Turner’s images clearly reference the threshold of such technologies; in one image, a jaguar approaches the camera, but only at its closest is the AI able to recognize it. Yet these shortfalls are also cause for concern; when people appear in Turner’s photographs, the algorithm is only able to establish their humanity to a degree.

For all their detail, Turner’s images function as an approximation of a landscape, a questioning of the supposed objectivity our imaging technologies are so often cloaked in. In this way, his photographs call to mind how our conceptions of the border are simplifications in their own right, flattening deeply complex spaces into binary topographies of domestic versus foreign, citizen versus Other. Yet, for all of the limitations his work underscores, Turner’s photographs also call us to look at these spaces in a new frame of reference–one that emphasizes continuity over categorization, unabashed complexity over easy truth.

See more of Alex’s work here.