Through her lens photographer Ada Luisa Trillo, whose work has been added to the Philadelphia Art Museum’s collection, portrays Mexico, human suffering, human trafficking, and social inequality. She has depicted and exposed the adversity that exploited women must overcome in their daily lives and show the side of prostitution the industry does not want you to see. “While I've noticed that many other artists deal with self exploration and/or fantasy, my photography deals with crude realities,” acknowledges Trillo. Among those crude realities was Trillo’s journey with a caravan of migrants headed from Chiapas, Mexico for the United States. She traveled nearly 3,000 miles to the US border in Tijuana, documenting their plight through stunning, yet heartbreaking, photography and video.
Born in El Paso, Texas, Trillo spent much of her childhood in Mexico and saw the horrors that women were suffering. She returned as an adult to reveal the violence and the dehumanization of Latino/Mexican people. It is through her passion of this art that she gains the trust of her subjects, to not be scared but to believe that there are good people in the world who will spread their stories to help them survive.
