It’s quite encouraging when a photographer takes up social issues with their documentary work. Doubly so when the work receives warranted praise for not just highlighting an issue, but for taking a perfect approach stylistically and with a specific point of view. It’s the images that you immediately recognize and know who is behind them that have a lasting quality to endure the test of time, and hopefully do some justice for the plight of those who need help the most. Headlines of U.S. immigration policies have become commonplace in recent years. Living in Los Angeles, close enough to the border with Mexico, and to have grown up with a keen knowledge of the U.S. Border Patrol operations, it is with great significance to me that the work of Tom Kiefer is also making headlines.

Interestingly, the start of this body of work comes from a very humble place. Needing a way to earn some additional income while pursuing his dream of documenting America’s cultural landscape, Tom takes on a job as a janitor at a nearby border patrol station, only to discover that the policies at that station are living in a very grey area for those that run the station and enforce these rules. Immigrants searching for a better life or getting to family members already in the U.S., after being caught by the patrol, have all of their possessions confiscated, being deemed “non-essential”. What are these items and how are they considered non-essential becomes the point of discussion. It takes no time at all to see that these items that Tom had collected for many years carry a lot of weight for what they represent. These are not just the objects of basic human existence, but objects of comfort and home, with those most especially telling, from children.

Morally, ethically, and culturally, Tom gives us food for thought and discussion of these policies. It is with great admiration for him that I had a chance to speak with him specifically about his work, El Sueño Americano / The American Dream, as well as some of my common questions about his creative practice. Once this work starts back up with its traveling tour, post-pandemic, you may have a chance to see the work up close and personal, and I hope you do. Tom is a master storyteller with his photographs of these personal effects, for each item has a story of its own to tell.

Bio -

Born in Wichita, Kansas, fine art photographer Tom Kiefer was raised primarily in the Seattle area and worked in Los Angeles as a graphic designer. Kiefer moved to Ajo, Arizona in December 2001 to fully develop and concentrate his efforts in studying and photographing the urban and rural landscape and the cultural infrastructure of the United States.

In July 2003, he started working part-time as a janitor at a nearby Customs and Border Protection station he found personal belongings seized and discarded by officials.

The migrants’ belongings, necessary for hygiene, comfort, and survival, were deemed “non-essential” or “potentially lethal.” Kiefer commemorates the untold stories these objects embody in photographs akin to portraits, preserving traces of human journeys cut short.

In 2015 Kiefer was included in LensCulture's top 50 emerging photographers and Photolucida's top 50 Critical Mass. His ongoing project, El Sueño Americano / The American Dream has been featured in news publications nationally and abroad. A major exhibition of El Sueño Americano / The American Dream was launched in 2019 at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles and is now traveling through 2024.

Interview -

Michael Kirchoff: Thank you, Tom, for taking the time to entertain my questions and provide some insight into your work and creative process. As I usually do, let’s begin with how you got your start in photography, though I do believe you started with a different creative medium, is that correct?

Tom Kiefer: Yes, I was a Graphic Designer. It was at the end of the 80’s, I had two of the largest design projects I’d ever worked on and both required a type of photography that wasn’t done in the studio or not readily available or affordable in general stock; artful views of buildings and their details, structures and landscape I couldn’t really hire and convey to a photographer to go out and do so I made the decision to go out and shoot it myself. I had recently completed a trade with a dear photographer friend, Brad Fowler, Provincetown; I designed a promotional brochure for his Pentax 6 x 7 medium format camera with an Asahi Super-Takumar lens, it ended up changing the direction of my life which I didn’t know at the time.

MK: Would you say that that's when you fell in love with photography? 

TK: I fell in love with photography when I was ten and was allowed to pick up the Kodak Instamatic and take pictures of our dog. In high school I got access to an actual camera, my dad’s Yashica from WW2. By the time I went to college, Graphic Arts was the most sensible path; photography then was still too much of an exotic and costly endeavor whereas Graphic Design was something you could do inside your head and control. Thankfully, part of the curriculum required a pretty thorough introduction to photography. You had to process your own film and do your own proof sheets, develop your own prints, learn about f-stops, film speeds, you know, the basics and craft of photography. Fortunately this was where I was exposed to Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Imogene Cunningham, Edward Weston, Minor White, Robert Frank and of course Ansel Adams.

MK: Well you were definitely informed by some heavy-hitters. I wanted to address some of your earlier work before moving into your latest project. You have a long history of documenting your surroundings. Where does this interest originate from?

TK: During the same period of my Graphic Arts education I was exposed to these iconic photographers and most of these greats were no longer living yet these images had a timeless presence to them. Seeing these photographs, many of which were documentary or photo journalism were records of truth and beautiful to look at, I found myself gazing into this black and white world. And less than ten years later I found myself photographing buildings and structures, the desiccated and worn landscape much in a similar manner.

I left Graphic Design in 1991 and opened up an Antique shop, traveling around America to find my merchandise. When I made the decision to sell the business it was to return to something that I started years ago and to further explore. I had to photograph America, travel around whenever possible and capture what was compelling and record on film.

MK: Moving into your most current work, can you give us a brief timeline of how El Sueño Americano - The American Dream came together before taking your first photograph? How and why was this important to you when you had no idea of what the future held for these artifacts?

TK: I started working part-time as a janitor at a U.S. Border Patrol station in July 2003. One of my first memories of the job was seeing the food, the cans of food the migrants and asylum seekers carried with them in their backpack. The agents would collect that food, set it aside and when there was this mountain of cans, it would take be taken to our local community food bank and our local newspaper would take a photograph of the agents standing in front of or behind the mountain of canned food. That happened the first couple of years of working there. A couple years later there was a change of leadership at the station and when new station chief put an end to all the food recovery. For the next couple of years all this perfectly good food was just being thrown out. To me that was so wrong. One day I finally mustered up the courage, went to a supervisor and asked, “Can I bring this food to the food bank?”, his response was “Bless you” and I was given permission to collect the food to bring to our local food bank. It was when, going in to retrieve the food that I saw the horror of what was also being taken away: a Bible, a rosary, a family photo. This was the middle of 2007. Sometime the following year I began recovering belongings; jeans, shoes, shirts, jackets, blankets. At first I donated these to our local thrift shop which I did with the utmost discretion; I knew this something that would have been more than frowned upon, I would have been fired and lost my job. So it was during, I think 2008 or 2009, I realized there had to be some kind of photographic solution to explain what was going on; it was about five years later that I started figuring out a way.

MK: This work has been used frequently to help illustrate the crisis happening at the border. Do you see any of this improving at all, or is it merely extending what has already been an ongoing situation? Does the recent virus outbreak not only affect the community you live in, but those at the poorer end of the spectrum, such as immigrants coming across the border in search of a better life?

TK: I do not know. I resigned in 2014; three years later in the summer of 2017 we all saw the images of children in cages and became aware of how they were being separated from their parents and families. I mean, if you're separating a child from their parent, taking away a bible, a rosary, a memento of a child’s most likely still going on. The confiscation of belongings is an act of cruelty and punishment, an act of power making another less than human.

MK: So very true. It’s so devastating to learn and understand what's going on. I think it's another thing to see what you have documented because that really brings the personal aspect home to people. Especially when you're viewing how they are taking these personal items away that are considered not essential when it's pretty clear that a lot of them are essential.

TK: A photograph of your child, or a baby’s shoe.

MK: Exactly.

TK: And now in terms of our current shared crisis, I can't even begin to address what is happening. What kind of nation do we want to be? And are we deporting people with the virus back into Mexico or their country of origin. And remember this isn’t just about people crossing the border. We’re talking about the people who are part of this country, essential workers and undocumented, living in fear of ICE knocking on the door and mom or dad being taken away.

MK: And like you mention, are we not putting our neighbor to the south at risk as well? I have to ask, in speaking again of these personal effects you’d collected for so long with seemingly no idea of what you were going to do with them initially, I wonder what prompted the epiphany of photographing them the way you did? It seems to me that the graphic designer in you suddenly switched the light on in regards to the possibilities, and it is abundantly clear that your background shows significantly in how these images are arranged. Did you go through different ideas of how you would put them together, both individually and as an exhibition?

TK: Around the 12th image I photographed an assembly of black combs and brushes on a black background that I realized this was the way forward. Seeing the image on my computer was a moment of clarity; this showed regard, reverence and respect of these belongings; these were sacred items.

MK: Absolutely. Now, I’d already seen some of this work in the past, like when it was featured in Photolucida’s Critical Mass competition in 2019. However, when I visited your exhibition at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, in January 2020, the breadth and scope of the project was immense. You had clearly been working on this series for quite some time, knew every little nuance about it and how to convey its meaning, and this exhibition was simply outstanding. This is so from both a fine art and a documentary perspective. How did you go about planning this show and do you feel that it has begun to generate the amount of praise and attention it deserves, most especially for the cultural and humanitarian aspects?

TK: Laura Mart, Skirball’s Curator is brilliant, it was her vision of how to put it all together. I’ve done different variations of how to install this work but hers was just more focused.

MK: How did the Skirball exhibition come about in the first place?

TK: Yes. We first met in person at an opening in Phoenix at Northlight Gallery, Arizona State University and the Herberger Institute's School of Art for the exhibit “Toward Reconciliation, Away” featuring two other artists, Terry Warpinski and Wendy Babcox, dealing with the U.S./Mexico, Israel/Palestine borders, the Berlin Wall in Germany, migration and reconciliation, curated by Liz Allen. The next day they travelled down to Ajo and spent basically the entire day in my studio immersing themselves in the project. Within in a few hours they were asking, “So would you like to do a major exhibition of your work at the Skirball?” It was a bit unreal.

MK: I can’t tell you how encouraging that is to hear. So now you had this major exhibition at the Skirball Cultural Center, and it has blossomed into a traveling exhibition. How did that come about? Were you making advances towards specific people or institutions that would respond favorably to this work?

TK: I wasn’t targeting any specific type of venue, this has all been a learning experience. The Skirball has packaged this exhibit up and are responding to and/or approaching museums, cultural centers and universities where this would be a good fit.

MK: Oh, interesting. And now, isn't Vassar College also taking it on?

TK: Some institutions are doing much smaller presentations of the work, like Vassar. I mean it was ready to go and then of course it has been postponed because of the pandemic. That presentation is a little over 30 pieces and we're trying to reschedule for the end of October this year. But as you can imagine, everything is up in the air because of the coronavirus crisis.

MK: I think the intention is for the Skirball Exhibition to continue traveling through 2024, is that right?

TK: Yes and then some.

MK: Right. Well, do you still have objects that you have not photographed, and are you continuing to photograph and broaden the collection?

TK: Yes, I’m continuing to photograph the belongings but the collection consists only of the items I recovered from 2007 until August 2014. My intention and hope is that this will all be housed at a university or center for immigration studies where the objects will be catalogued and cared for, and researchers can visit. This is a part of our nation’s history, a very specific time in this particular region of our country. I’ve sometimes referred to this area and the corridor that many pass through as like the ‘Ellis Island of the Desert’.

MK: When I first begin to view these works, it takes only a very short time before the weight of what I’m looking at begins to build an emotional response. I can only imagine, knowing what you are working on and what you have yet to photograph still, that there are instances of intense emotional response from you yourself. Are there times you feel that you have to simply step away from the project to gather yourself together before taking further steps?

TK: Not really.

MK: Is that because you've been living with them for so long?

TK: This is my job, I am completely devoted to this project and for a more compassionate and humane treatment of people, whether they live here undocumented or who want to come to America just as so many of our forebears did a single or multiple generations before.

MK: So emotion doesn't really play into it because you're so - so deep into it that this is something that you're documenting for future generations.

TK: Of course I’m emotionally connected to these items.

MK: One might say that you're a bit of a cultural archaeologist.

TK: That’s not too far off. I certainly don’t have a degree or ever studied as such.

MK: I wanted to move on to a few more “general" questions about your creative process, especially in regard to visualizing a project or body of work. First of all, do you study what others are doing, and do you find their influence in your own image-making?

TK: I rarely do that. It is always a joy and inspiration to come across work of an artist who is compassionately devoted to their vocation as it to experience others who do work for their own sheer pleasure. Instagram is something else for sure. It's just such an incredible experience to see other people’s heartfelt expression.

MK: With regard to creativity and the projects you take on. Do you feel it is better to create work that fits a particular style for yourself, branch out and try new things, or better to simply leave yourself open to possibilities that happen organically?

TK: Oh, definitely the latter.

MK: How do you tap into creativity? Is it something that has to just come to you, or is it something that you have to actively work towards?

TK: It just comes. I try to not force it - it can evolve or sometimes just happens. I admire people who have that capability and who can really apply that type of critical thinking to arrive at a project or something that they're going to pursue. For me one it seems to be a passive sort of process, one thing leads to another and I find myself there.

MK: This question is so extremely broad, and I apologize for that but is vitally important - what drives you as a creator?

TK: It’s April 2020, the pandemic is cutting a swath across this country unimaginable, predictable but nothing that we can relate to as a shared experience. If asked the question a month ago my response would have been compassion, respect and tolerance. I would add on to that: what’s the alternative?

MK: Excellent, Tom. I really appreciate you taking the time to talk with me. This has really been a great conversation and I'm very happy to have done this with you. I'm excited to get it done and get it out there to everybody. I think from a cultural standpoint, it's very significant work, and I have to thank you for doing this with me in the first place.

TK: Well, Michael, thank you very much and I'm glad that you did.

You can find more of Tom's work on his website here.

Also, take a moment to connect with Tom on Instagram here.

All photographs, ©Tom Kiefer.