Is an American photographer. Her work was exhibited in international photography festivals such as the Athens Photo Festival at the Benaki Museum in Athens, Greece; and Cortona on the Move, in Cortona, Italy, as well as appearing in a biennial at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, USA, and at GuatePhoto International Photography Festival in Guatemala City, Guatemala. Her work is in collection institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art Library in New York, Whitney Museum of American Art Library, Smithsonian American Art Museum Library, the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago and the Nelson Atkins Museum for Art in Kansas City. A photobook of her work with artist Antone Dolezal, Devil’s Promenade, was published by Overlapse Books in 2021. A second photobook, Desire Lines, was published by Overlapse Books in 2023. Lara’s photographs appear in publications such as The New Yorker Magazine, Harper’s Magazine, British Journal of Photography, Atlantic Monthly, Vice, and NPR.
Desire Lines by Lara Shipley is a story about borders. But the lines that mark these borders are also the scars left by deep wounds, the trace of a longing, the uncertain outline of an expectation — of a new beginning. As the opening chapter of the Homecoming exhibition cycle, the American photographer’s show explores the multifaceted theme of “returning home,” casting a gaze over the sun-scorched landscapes of the Sonoran Desert between Arizona and Mexico — one of the most politically and emotionally charged frontiers in the United States, and the center of an increasingly polarized debate on immigration… policy.
The question of how to manage migratory flows — a key issue at the heart of today’s social and political tensions around the world — felt particularly central to the curatorial research that this exhibition series sets in motion. The idea behind Homecoming is to explore the notion of returning home in the precarious balance between global interconnection and the human need to reclaim one’s roots — or to find one’s place in the world.
For Lara Shipley, “home” is both the place migrants leave behind and the place they hope to find as they cross the border. And yet, many of those who survive the desert crossing remain suspended in a kind of limbo — caught between the nostalgia for what they have lost and the disillusionment with what they encounter in a country where they are destined to feel like outsiders forever.
Beyond the stark beauty of Sonora’s lunar-like landscape — dusty hills, wind-bent shrubs, and a horizon marked by helicopters and drones in a hyper-surveilled territory — Desire Lines explores a more metaphorical border: a sense of estrangement and not-belonging, a recurring story of desire and domination that repeats over time.
By blending documentary photography with archival materials, Shipley situates the current migration crisis along the U.S. border within a much longer historical continuum — one in which new waves of migrants fleeing poverty and searching for hope from the south come into conflict with the descendants of settlers who, in generations past, arrived from the east driven by similar hardships and in search of the very same promise.
