What Is Found There
-
Dates2024 - Ongoing
-
Author
WHAT IS FOUND THERE recontextualizes 20 years of journalistic assignments and NGO commissions, challenging the dominant paradigms I worked in and attempting to decolonize storytelling by engaging the viewers’ intuition in novel, collaborative ways.
"It is difficult to get the news from poems yet men die miserably every day for lack of what is found there."
—William Carlos Williams, from Asphodel, That Greeny Flower
Over the last few years, I’ve been reviewing the full history of my work, challenging the foundations of my role as a full-time international photojournalist. I have been asking hard questions about privilege and purpose, systemic supremacies, agency, authorship, art, and representation. And—if my photography can inform these concerns—how it might be deconstructed and reimagined to vitalize new possibilities in knowing an infinitely diverse yet inextricably connected world.
WHAT IS FOUND THERE recontextualizes images from 20 years of assignments and commissions, challenging the dominant paradigms I worked within. This collaborative and process-based project dynamically reveals new interpretations of my professional photography by considering it outside of an issue-driven, journalistic framework, and combining it with images from a private ‘photo journal’ reflecting personal experiences and daily observations over the same 20 years.
The collages intuitively combine images made at different times, in different places, and with different intentions; each polyptych extracting unintended insights and individualized truths independent of the expectations of why an image was made or what it should mean. While many of the assignment images document recognizable and familiar social and environmental issues—and so may still evoke more globally focused meditations on ways we live on the planet and with each other—the physical manipulations of the surfaces and deliberate creation of new objects (hand-mounting prints; painting and drawing on the images; and surreal compositions in intuitive multi-image combinations) prioritize the symbolic language and subjective nature of photography over the literal documentation of facts. There is no place, date, or caption information provided, nor are the personal photographs annotated in any way. These works are not meant to be evidence, explanatory, juxtaposition, or to provide specific answers. Each visual phrase stands alone as a glimpse into a dynamic response to what we witness and an active effort to restore creative and energetic balance in the world. The results invite the viewer to make sense of it all for themselves by considering their observations in the context of their own experiences and biases—to understand their story in the stories of others. Each viewer thus creates novel narratives engaging the photographer, the photographs, those photographed, and themselves as they surface their own truths about themselves, their place in the world beyond themselves, and the interconnectedness of human experience.
