Join us for a launch of “Left Behind: Life and Death Along the U.S. Border”:catalog/32056, by documentary photographer Jonathan Hollingsworth. On Friday, October 19th, 6-8 PM, Hollingsworth will talk about the project and the production of the book, published by Dewi Lewis Publishing.

Left Behind delivers a sobering look at those who do not survive the Arizona border crossing and the personal effects that they leave behind. The work takes the viewer on a journey through the day-to-day operations of the forensic science center, as well as into its archive of personal effects of the border crossers. Hollingsworth also travelled to Nogales (site of the largest border patrol station in the United States) and to Green Valley, Arizona where he discovered belongings left on the desert floor by migrants awaiting road-side pick-up in the dead of night.

Every year since 2001 no less than 150 sets of the decomposed or skeletal remains of people crossing into the US from Mexico have been discovered in remote areas of Arizona’s Sonoran Desert. Pima County Forensic Science Center in Tucson deals with most of them, analyzing and storing their remains, archiving their possessions – and, hopefully, determining their identities.

New York based, Jonathan Hollingworth’s previous photographic series, What We Think Now, documented young Americans’ response to the Iraq War, and was published as a catalog and exhibited at the California Museum of Photography, Santa Fe Art Institute, Center for Photography at Woodstock, and Houston Center for Photography. He has been published widely, including The Sunday Times Magazine and Photo District News.