In 2005, three young Americans, Rudy Adler, Victoria Criado, and Brett Huneycutt, whose backgrounds include activism, economics, and advertising, wondered what would happen if they gave disposable cameras to two groups of people on different sides of the border between the United States and Mexico: undocumented migrants crossing into the United States, and American Minutemen trying to stop them....

In the early decades of the twentieth century, a number of academics, social welfare advocates, and muckrakers became interested in the living conditions of recently arrived immigrants to the United States. One such person was Professor Francis Greenwood Peabody of Harvard University. In 1903, he founded the Social Museum, which was established "to promote investigations of modern social...