Bed Checks
Bed Checks is an authentic look inside one of the hundreds of thousands of relationships affected, and endangered, by the limits on freedom of movement imposed by the state.
A “bed check” is an immigration enforcement tactic wherein government agents knock on the married couple’s door at dawn, seeking proof that the citizen and “the alien” sleep in the same bed. This project began as a reaction to the government’s perverse attention to the photographers’ mixed immigration status marriage. Combining photographs with the documents from the so-called “alien file” obtained through a freedom of information request, the project negotiates the territory between surveillance and privacy, intimacy and performance, individual and the state.
Despite being widely seen as the easiest way to immigrate to the United States, mixed status marriages are subject to an invasive vetting process. Applicants are compelled to spend thousands of dollars on legal and application fees. Those who cannot afford to do so, or do not meet the income requirement, face being separated. Immigrants are compelled to self-police, crafting the types of marriages most likely to pass the vetting process. Failure to meet the standard of evidence can lead to deportation, and what counts as evidence – a capitalist trail of shared consumption and debt – is irrevocably tied to power dynamics of race, gender, and class.
As the camera’s point of view shifts from inside to the outside of the relationship, the project confronts the viewers’ notions of family, migration, and photographic evidence.
