by Alice Driver, Women Under Siege, USA – The year photographer Itzel Aguilera moved to the Mexican border city of Ciudad Juárez in 2008, it achieved notoriety as the most violent city in the world. Living there with her husband and daughters Valeria, 6, and Dalia, 7 months old, Aguilera, who is 43, was starting to feel unsafe.
“We were going through a very difficult time, a period of true violence,” she said. “I began to realize that I didn’t have very many options to go out.” When she’d lived previously among the 22 million souls in Mexico City, she had created a haunting series of black-and-white portraits of the Mennonite community in northern Mexico that capture the joy of a life lived closely in connection with the earth. However, in Juárez, her work turned inward by necessity to represent the intimate details of daily life—to capture lives in a place of violence but to show that they didn’t consist of only violent acts.
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