Panoramic Wall Photos Examine the World’s Most Volatile Borders

In photographing politically significant walls from all over the world, one thing has become clear to photographer Kai Wiedenhöfer: “Peace begins where walls fall, not where they are erected,” he says.

For him the best example of this is perhaps the most famous — the Berlin Wall, the fall of which he witnessed with his own eyes in 1989 as a first-year university student, which he also photographed. “It became the very symbol for the downfall of the USSR as a superpower and the end of a world order that had shaped our planet and lives for almost half a century. It was the most exciting and positive political event I’ve witnessed in my life.”

Wiedenhöfer was not alone in hoping and believing that the fall of the Berlin wall signaled an end to such divisions between people and countries. Instead, over the next 20 years barriers only seemed to increase. His latest book, Confrontier, is a global survey of these walls, including borders in Belfast, Israel, Baghdad, the American-Mexican border, Cyprus, and Korea, as well as the remains of the Iron Curtain. It’s an attempt to “stress that walls and fences of borders are no solutions to today’s global political and economic problems.”

His access to many of the sites was aided by assignment letters from well-known publications, which allowed him to get the needed approval from agents checking on papers and credentials. Once approved, he would document the barrier the best he could using his panoramic film camera, chosen because it was especially well-suited for the long horizontal shapes of the walls. He prefers morning or early evening light, which he says can make the walls look like “landscape sculpture,” and often looks for an elevated position, sometimes shooting from the roof of his rental car. Wiedenhöfer paid for most of the travel himself, with help from a few grants, sometimes selling the photos to publications afterwards.

In Arizona, as Wiedenhöfer set up his camera for the early evening light, he could see people crossing over the multi-million dollar wall, taking them only about 30 seconds. At the steel fence border in San Diego, he watched people using a blowtorch to cut big holes in the steel, in a kind of cat-and-mouse game with the border patrol. Pointing to the California territory’s shift from Mexico to the United States after the Mexican-American war in 1846, he quotes local people as saying “I didn’t cross the border, the border crossed me.” Wiedenhöfer says that a frequent response to the project seems to be that citizens of different countries often feel its own walls are entirely justified, and are indignant at any comparison with the Berlin wall.

Confrontier builds on a previous project called Wall, for which Wiedenhöfer documented life along the Gaza-Egypt border from 2003 to 2006, where he saw firsthand the damage inflicted on people living in the area. In order to continually strengthen the wall and to expand the “buffer zone” around it, he says, entire blocks of houses in Palestinian territory were demolished.

The walls Wiedenhöfer photographs and the territories they delineate become internal signposts as well as external ones — asserting and emphasizing differences. Wiedenhöfer believes that the dramatic physical and visual qualities of the wall are important to people.

“In the USA [with the border fence], for example,” he says, “Voters can say, ‘OK, the state is doing something, because a wall is a physical thing standing somewhere.’ In the Arizona desert, it’s very visual. And at the same time, it also becomes a mental thing.”