Notes from a dream
America, through an immigrant's lens — a pilgrimage with a beginning and no end.
Border Field — where the country runs out into the Pacific. I stood on this side. ↗
I began to see and know this land the moment I arrived, more than a decade ago. So this work has a beginning, but no end.
Commuting daily through New York, traveling for work and for nothing at all, making my way out to the far corners — Hawaii, Alaska — I started gathering the moments that asked to be noticed.
Their weight comes from distance: the cultural difference, the social distance I felt when I met them. A new definition of beauty. A complicated exchange on the street. A tradition everyone but me seemed already to have agreed on. Each one made me wonder, and made me want to keep it.
12 years & counting — still a foreigner with a camera.
The Road keeps its own time
A school, folded into the grass. The drawing still says, "Welcome to school."
Some years the country opened up. Some years it just held still.
The beauty out here is a different shape — wide, unhurried, half-ruined, and somehow still expecting children.
The City, and its agreed-upon strangeness
A window full of hands: "Hands up if you got vaccinated." A tradition I was still learning to read.
The closer a thing looks to home, the farther it sometimes feels.
Some things here became ordinary to everyone but me. A sign in a shop window turns a year of fear into a punchline. People agree on a gesture, a queue, a way of standing apart — and I copy it a half-second late, still translating.
That half-second is the whole project. It is the gap I keep photographing: between arriving and belonging, between the country I read about and the one I keep bumping into. I don't expect to close it. I've started to think the gap is where I actually live.
— a beginning, and no end.