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He takes pictures of bodies and survivors, migrants and countrymen, violence and vigils.

The 51-year-old photographer puts his life on the line for such photography because he wants the world to know of a patch of earth that many American journalists — even those in Mexico, too — fear to tread and often avoid.

That’s because the violence by Mexican cartels and other criminals who control swaths of the borderlands have secured a reputation for ferocious violence and carnage, including to those who dare to chronicle the death toll.

To capture the human suffering and endurance, often in the powerful imagery of black-and-white photographs, Cardona doesn’t venture out alone anymore. He partners with other photographers — who had been competitors under less dark times — because they believe there’s greater safety in numbers.

“When you work as a local journalist, it’s more frequent that you (are) facing more risks,” he said in an interview at California State University, Northridge, where he spoke to students about cartel violence and where his photos are on display this month.

Cardona has observed how the Mexican side of the border has been a landscape of change, beginning with the North American Free Trade Agreement in the early 1990s to the massive movement of Mexicans to the United States and elsewhere.

Many parts of Juarez are now a “ghost town,” he says.

Last year, Juarez recorded 1,933 violent deaths, according to the Chihuahua state attorney’s office. That figure is considered exorbitant, especially when compared with the 209 homicides in New York City last year, even though that U.S. city’s population is six times greater than Juarez’s.

Even so, that figure represented a 38% decline in violent deaths from the year before, when the city counted 3,117 killings. The number of violent deaths was 2,643 in 2009 and 1,607 in 2008. A mere 300 killings were reported in 2007.

Juarez also is known for its high “femicide” rate, the unsolved murders of hundreds of girls and women.

“During my childhood, Juarez was a very calm place, very secure place,” Cardona told CNN.

“It’s changed to be very insecure and has become for four years the most violent city on the earth,” he added.

“You are covering one massacre as another massacre is happening in another district of the city,” Cardona said. “We have disappearances of women, we have disappearances of men, we have execution of women, execution of men, bodies of women left in the desert. People who don’t pay extortion are assassinated. People who are kidnapped are assassinated, also. People who refuse to give their cars are killed, also. It is a wide spectrum of where you can be killed in Juarez.

“According to some of my colleagues,” he continued, “90% of the cases are never investigated. That can give you the idea of the role of the state and this terrible situation.”

Before Juarez became synonymous with homicide, the city used to be a party town, with a robust nightlife.

But a University of Juarez study shows that the bloodshed since the early 1990s has displaced 250,000 people, Cardona said.

“In many places it looks like a ghost town, a ghost district,” he said.

Cardona dares to enter these haunted places — as well as populated neighborhoods.

“Most of the time the people I meet are going into turning points of their lives. It’s very often I’m a witness to these changes in their lives,” he said.

“Under these circumstances, it is incredible how people are still open to talk to a journalist and tell their stories, and how their communities have been devastated by the economy, and how they cannot sustain their lives and families’ educations — they have to migrate to the U.S. — and also how people struggle to survive and make a living in the U.S. doing very dangerous jobs.”

Cardona lives in Juarez, but his parents and siblings live across the border in El Paso, Texas, and don’t visit him because of the violence, he said.

CNN’s Jade Biesboer contributed to this report.

Editor’s note: Sherry Colb is a professor of law and Charles Evans Hughes Scholar at Cornell University Law School.

The plaintiffs in the case, Florence v. Board of Chosen Freeholders, were arrested for relatively minor offenses, such as walking a dog without a leash. Their lawsuit challenged a policy in two New Jersey detention facilities where all arrested people are strip-searched before joining the inside population.

In one facility, this means “a complete disrobing, followed by an examination of the nude inmate … by the supervising officer, which is then followed by a supervised shower with a delousing agent.” In the other facility, the booking process “required groups of 30 to 40 arrestees to enter a large shower room, simultaneously remove all of their clothing, place it in boxes and then shower.”

If you have ever driven over the speed limit in New Jersey, it could be you in that shower.

The Supreme Court quite recently accepted the idea that the Constitution requires a greater justification for strip searches than for less-intrusive searches. In Safford v. Redding, decided in 2009, the court said that searches exposing the breasts and pelvic area were “categorically distinct, requiring distinct elements of justification.”

People in jails and prisons, however, have long enjoyed less privacy than free people.

In Bell v. Wolfish, the Supreme Court upheld a policy that subjected all detainees to visual body cavity searches after they had visitors. It emphasized that detention facilities had a special need for heightened security that weighs heavily against inmates’ privacy.

For similar reasons, the court in Florence ruled in favor of strip searches.

No one would deny that U.S. prisons and jails are dangerous places filled with weapons, drugs and other contraband. Achieving security in such institutions is crucial. But that does not mean strip searches are either a necessary or an effective means of doing so. The Supreme Court has an obligation to protect the privacy of inmates by scrutinizing law enforcement policies that concern people who have not even gone to trial for their alleged misdemeanors. The court’s failure to do so is an abdication of its responsibilities.

Prison and jail officials have exceedingly difficult jobs and are entitled to flexibility in their efforts to secure the institutions they run. Strip searches, however, are extremely intrusive, humiliating and frequently traumatic, as the Supreme Court has acknowledged. Even in the Supreme Court building itself, where the need for security is undoubtedly great, guards do not strip search members of the public who come to watch oral arguments.

Imagine the fallout if they did.

The plaintiffs in Florence, it is worth remembering, are not very different from the crowds that gather outside the Supreme Court to hear oral arguments. They were not charged with or even suspected of drug-dealing, assault or other violent conduct. They are people who sometimes drive over the speed limit, who walk their dogs without a leash now and then and who might miss a child support payment on occasion.

No one should have to undergo a strip search simply because she had the misfortune of being arrested and taken to jail for what almost everyone has done at one time or another. To rubber-stamp subjecting them to strip searches without any demonstrable need, without an iota of reasonable suspicion and without any evidence that such policies are effective is to perpetrate an injustice unworthy of our high court.

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The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Sherry Colb.

CNN’s Vivian Kuo contributed to this report.