INTROSPECTION Moments scatter and disappear. Sometimes a memory surfaces. A glance, a smell, a silence. Flash perceptions that rise and vanish as quickly as they came. Masks form as identities bend, shaping what we choose to show the world and what we keep hidden.

Life seems chronological, yet memories move on their own terms. They drift, return, or fall away. Some settle in quietly. Other memories come back with force, vivid and insistent, in full color. What lingers after everything else collapses tells its own truth.

More than fifty years ago, loss entered my life without warning. The quiet that followed shaped how I learned to see. I tried to understand what was missing by paying attention to what remained.

Within these traces are the threads we hold inside and the spaces where presence once lived. What stays beneath the surface is the self that appears when the performance falls away.

PALIMPSEST Memory does not stay still. It shifts and revises itself, sometimes gently and sometimes without warning, leaving faint impressions of everything it has touched. Over time the visible world gathers these impressions and becomes layered with them. What we see is never only the present. It carries what has settled beneath it.

The word palimpsest comes from manuscripts that were scraped down and written over, yet never fully erased. That is how memory behaves. It stains perception. It presses through.

This project is not a record of landscape. It is about how memory alters what is visible, how fog, atmosphere, and light hold the remains of what we have lived. These softened horizons and shifting fields of color are the afterimages of experience resurfacing.

Each photograph leans toward recollection. What is left is not documentation, but a record of perception as it blurs, resurfaces, and rewrites itself in the act of seeing.

DIGNITY: The Light Within Dignity sits in conversation with Introspection, even though their subjects differ. Where Introspection turns inward, shaped by personal reflection and the silence of absence, Dignity faces outward toward strangers met on city streets, each carrying their own story. But both series circle the same terrain: the emotional architecture of being human.

In Dignity, I traveled across the United States making portraits of people I met in public spaces. Most were unhoused, and others were simply passing through. What struck me wasn’t just the harshness of circumstance, but the emotional weight beneath the surface: regret, joy, fear, hope, and a hunger for connection. These portraits don’t document environments. They confront the viewer with presence, eye to eye.

Like Introspection, this work is not about answers. It’s about the quiet reckoning that happens when we slow down long enough to really see another person and, in doing so, see ourselves. What we share goes deeper than appearances. It touches something elemental: our need for recognition, for belonging, for love. That’s the heart of both series.

This series includes many portraits because every person deserves to be seen. No edit could honor the project’s ethics without also erasing individuals from the story.