Thomas Kiefer: El Sueño Americano – The American Dream | LENSCRATCH

I first encountered Thomas Kiefer’s powerful and timely project, El Sueño Americano – The American Dream, two years ago at the Medium Festival of Photography in San Diego. The project stayed with me long after the event and I’m thrilled to have had a chance to see the work on exhibition and share it today. El Sueño Americano – The American Dream is a heartbreaking series of conceptual still lifes focusing on objects collected when when Thomas was a janitor at a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol processing facility in Southwest Arizona. The items were items taken from migrants trying to cross the border and then discarded. Thomas retrieved the artifacts and created an artistic re-visioning that documents stories of pain, possibility, loss, and hope. This profound series focuses on simple things that migrants brought with them on their journeys–a bar of soap, a toothbrush, a pair of gloves–relics that had significant meaning to the original owner. The work speaks to the crisis of those seeking a better life on our side of the border and as Thomas states about the objects, “their disposal is a clear and intentional act of dehumanization”.