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When you walk up to the entrance to Diana Molina's photo exhibit about immigration at the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History, you are faced with a 10-foot-high chain-link fence topped with barbed wire.

But once inside, you are welcomed by faces - lots of faces - and both sides of the human story of a divisive issue.

"Seven-String Barbed Wire Fence" runs through the end of the month. It will cap its run with a lecture at the museum on Oct. 1 featuring Molina and her collaborator, writer Jake Rollow, who is from her hometown of El Paso.

Molina includes photos of immigrants and border vigilantes. In addition to photos there is a video installation (a large-screen TV behind more barbed wire) and a collection of objects and personal effects she collected along the border, from Texas to California.

Molina and Rollow met on the immigration freedom ride through the South in 2003. They have hung out with the Minutemen patrols in four states. This year, they attended rallies inspired by tough immigration legislation.

The photos show people on both sides of the issue in a very real, often ordinary, way. There's a group crossing a bridge in Selma, Ala., black, white and brown striding arm in arm. Three Minutemen silhouetted against a violet desert sky. Two altar boys holding a sign that says "All God's children."

"I feel that it's a story about humanity," Molina said. "And to find a solution to this ongoing conflict it's necessary to understand the people and everybody's journey and viewpoint and why they're coming over."

Molina's ancestors came from Mexico. She was raised, in part, by a Mexican woman, Juanita, who was in the United States illegally but who eventually became part of Molina's family.

How did Molina, nurtured in that culture, connect with the Minutemen and others who want to block immigrants from entering the United States?

"I was going to their camps," she said, "and spending extensive time with them. You meet all kinds of people - the kind you want to run away from and others who, in the cold and the wind, they'd take the shirt or jacket off their backs and give it to me."

Molina has had quite a journey herself. After graduating from the University of Texas in Austin, she was a software engineer there and in North Carolina. She spent 10 years in Spain and Amsterdam, during which time she transformed herself into a writer and photographer.

She has settled closer to family the past five or six years, near Anthony, N.M., which is between Las Cruces and Juarez.

The exhibit will move later this year to the Institute of Texas Culture in San Antonio.

One of the more powerful pieces in the exhibit is the collection of found objects. Molina would tag along on trash runs near the border. Here are some of the items on display:

A pair of child's shoes

A compact with a chipped mirror

Empty or near-empty liquor bottles

A can of Axe deodorant

A Mexican voter's photo ID for "Dominguez Martinez Eduardo" of Tejupilco, Mexico, age 32

A packet of medication that looks like birth-control pills

A backpack with a Spanish-language Bible inside

Two packets of Alka Seltzer

A golf ball

A dirty teal polo shirt

Toilet paper

A tin can of tuna

A piece of rusted steel from a crumbling wall.

The everyday items drive home the idea that human beings aren't very different in their journey on Earth.

"I felt like it was an anthropological survey, including objects that depicted this time in our history of immigration," Molina said. "It was very moving to find the personal items, like the Bible and letters."

One letter she didn't include wished a young man a safe journey and success, and it assured him that it was OK for him to go off to find what he couldn't back home.

Molina doesn't know what happened to the young man.

She does speak by phone with some of the people who successfully crossed the border and are trying to make a living here. She also talks to Bob Wright who heads the New Mexico chapter of the Minutemen.

And she has gotten reaction from a number of people who have seen the exhibit.

"People have found it to be very fair and very balanced," she said. "It's brought tears to some people.

"Some people take away what they bring in. They have their opinions, and they'll walk out of there with their point of view fortified."

Others, she said, tell her the exhibit gives them a broader understanding of both sides of the issue.

Molina goes back to Juanita, the woman who helped raise her and who took care of Molina's grandmother in her final years.

That has informed her dealings with others, people from all perspectives.

"It's a person," she said. "It doesn't matter what their status is, legal or illegal. You deal with people one-on-one."