Felipe Romero Beltrán, Bravo (2025)11 Images
The Rio Bravo runs between Colorado and the Gulf of Mexico, becoming the Mexico-United States border after New Mexico, where it separates Texas and Chihuahua, Coahuila, Nuevo León and Tamaulipas. As Colombian photographer Felipe Romero Beltrán indicates, the river, also referred to as the Rio Grande, claims “a distinct dual role as both a natural watercourse and a political border”. Subsequently, it’s both a source of hope and a place of anguish, privy to the potential of the so-called American Dream but more keenly perceived as a hostile threshold.
Beginning in 2020, Romero Beltrán photographed friends and friends of friends living on the Mexican side of the border for what would become his latest book, Bravo. The series was made against the backdrop of tightened migration policies, heightened border militarisation, and shifting asylum law – such as Title 42, a Covid-era policy invoked under the pretence of a public health measure, under which asylum seekers and those arriving in the US illegally could be immediately expelled, and the ongoing Operation Lone Star, which has implemented a series of aggressive measures since 2021, such as installing over 1000 metres of razor wire on the Texas border.
“It was built from a context of friendship,” the photographer explains, recalling the project’s genesis. “Some were people I had met in Spain a few years before [he got his PhD at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, later collaborating with young men at an internment centre in Seville for 2024’s Dialect], then it was expanded through texts, images from other projects and conversations about the border condition, especially in relation to the history of Latino migration to the United States.”
Currently on show at KBr Fundación MAPFRE in Barcelona (after winning last year’s KBr Photo Award, with additional exhibitions to follow in Madrid and Nimes), the new monograph, a collaboration between Fundación MAPFRE and publisher Loose Joints, builds on Romero Beltrán’s practice concerning rivers and borders; places that operate in tandem as beginnings and endings, and the nucleus for much of his work examining how identity intersects with geography. Exploring the lesser-documented limbo of those waiting to cross, and in many cases those who ultimately resist crossing at all, the series considers how their lives have been affected by policies established in the US.
“I had worked on a river before in Colombia [for his project, Magdalena, detailing the macabre story of found body parts], and there was something that resonated with me in that sense,” reflects Romero Beltrán, who was born in Bogota, Colombia and now lives in Paris. “My initial aim was perhaps closer to the river [Bravo] as a character and its political condition. However, as years went by, I became more interested in the landscape before the border: an intermediate place where there is a very special kind of waiting, that of the person who decides not to cross.”
“I believe that each tool responds to the project,” he continues, referencing his approach to image-making in an email. “Collaboration is fundamental in any kind of photography. In this case, the project operates in the present and seeks the past through the traces and marks that are in the territory.” Moreover, as Fundación MAPFRE exhibitions manager and KBr curator Victoria Del Val observes in the book’s opening text, Romero Beltrán’s practice “is situated at the limits of documentary photography”. Indeed, this sentiment is echoed throughout Bravo, as Romero Beltrán consolidates the language of documentary photography with a more conceptual objective.
The book concludes with further essays by Salvadoran migrant Dominick Bermúdez, thinker Albert Corbí, and artist Alejandra Aragón, who provide additional context for its visual content, underscoring the fact that these photographs exist not in a vacuum but as part of something more wide-reaching; the pictures themselves are separated into three chapters. Cieras/Endings identifies the interior spaces where Romero Beltrán’s friends spend their time, while the portrait series Cuerpos/Bodies, considered by its author to be the project’s foundation, foregrounds objects as well as individuals: “Some of the still lifes are almost portraits, you can see a description of a person through the traces that appear in the space,” he says, alluding to the significance of rocks and kitchenware.
Meanwhile, Brechas/Breaches is the final core chapter (stills from a video piece called El Cruce/The Crossing appear in the appendix) and takes us outside, highlighting the unofficial pathways to the river. Depicted by Romero Beltrán, these largely vacant scenes feel particularly static – time is suspended. He muses, “In Spanish, ‘brecha’ [breach] also means ‘wound’. A resonance that echoes through the scars in the landscape.”
Bravo by Felipe Romero Beltrán is published by Loose Joints & Fundacíon MAPFRE and is available to order here.
