In 2014 I got involved in a fundraising initiative to support a special unit for babies who were taken into safe keeping. The task: Take pictures of these children for a calendar, but make sure they cannot be identified. I remember spending a whole afternoon in a small room on the floor with the social worker as they brought in one baby/child after the other. It was deeply moving, since all of these children have either been abandoned by their parents or taken into safe protection.
The project was about using my way of seeing to tell a story, to show what was hidden, to stand in service. How do I witness the innocence and devastation of childhood in a way that will allow it to be heard and seen? There were no poses or performance or fake smiles. There was only the unsaid and unseen. But for me it was a connection, and a belonging. A belonging to what it means to be human: the terror and the awe, the harshness and the soothing, the hidden that is in the open, the beauty in the teeth of a dead dog.











