ABSTRACT
Focusing on a photo essay created by Spanish photojournalist Samuel Aranda between 2009 and 2015, this chapter shows how engaged documentary photography can bring to light the unseen and ignored realities of migrant experience in ways that dramatic, media images of migrants cannot. Aranda’s images from Mount Gourougou in Morocco, overlooking the Spanish colonial city of Melilla, frame both the politics of the border and borderline existence. They picture life lived at the barest level of survival and act as pathways for redressing the social inequalities and injustices that marginalize undocumented migrants on the border between Africa and Europe.
