WHAT IS FOUND THERE recontextualizes images from 20+ years of story assignments, NGO commissions, and personal projects, challenging the hierarchies in the dominant paradigms I worked within as an international photojournalist. This process explores the roles of representation, agency, authorship, truth, intuition, and perspective in photojournalistic work, asking how witnessing might be deconstructed and reimagined to vitalize new ways of knowing an infinitely diverse yet inextricably connected world.

Each polyptych poetically combines images made at different times, in different places, and with different intentions. While the assignment and commissioned images document recognizable and familiar social or environmental issues—and so may still evoke literal 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; painting and drawing on the images; and surreal compositions in intuitive collages with variable relief) prioritize the symbolic language and subjective nature of photography, and the consideration of relationships in place of documentation of facts.

There is no place, date, or caption information provided, nor are the personal photographs annotated in any way. They are not meant to be evidence, explanation, ironic juxtaposition, or to provide specific answers. These works instead hint at the subconscious inspirations in the moments photographed, while embracing the viewer’s agency and sovereignty— and baggage— inviting them to discover their own novel narratives and personal meanings. The process engages the photographer, the photographs, and the photographed, with the viewers themselves as they surface their own truths about themselves, their place in the world beyond themselves, and the interconnectedness of human experience.