Crossing Over: Immigration Stories

In Crossing Over I use alternative photo processes to create a hybrid documentary using anonymous cyanotype portraits and accompanying them with one-on-one interviews with immigrants, descendants of immigrants, and asylum seekers. These interviews are all archived with the Library of Congress through StoryCorps, and then edited for exhibition with the cyanotype banners all over the world.

No human is illegal. The goal of this project is to viscerally prompt acknowledgement by identifying with the form represented as an ethereal portrait of each person who is an immigrant or a descendant of an immigrant. Visual arresting artwork that is followed with testimonial audio from interviews playing in gallery of experiences of immigration and seeking asylum throughout the world.

This begins with the creation of artworks created as imprints of the physical body and recording actual experiences with one on one audio interviews. It then is followed up with presenting the work to the world through public exhibition of both audio and portraits, and online public access to unedited and archived audio interviews.

Crossing Over in its initial form at the 2019 Venice Biennale right now and has been on view throughout the U.S. in New York City, Philadelphia, Upstate New York, and Texas.

Artist Statement:

Jackie Neale, Philadelphia b.1972, a former Online Publications Imaging Director at NYC’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a photographic artist, documentary photographer, author, and teacher. She prefers to feature diverse communities throughout the United States and abroad. Through affiliations with arts institutions, she completed residencies and commissioned projects in New York City, Philadelphia, in Mission, Texas, as well as in Calabria and Milan, Italy.

Jackie began Crossing Over: Immigration Stories to gain greater insight about the impact on lives by U.S.-Mexico immigration and border policies which extended into looking at immigration policy in her family’s country of origin, Italy. Her project revealed a higher plane of connection as well, the images being ethereal, and therefore spiritual. When one makes the choice to leave their family, to immigrate to another country for a better life, it feels the same in so many ways as leaving one body/form of self to go to another.