seen and unseen is the culmination of a year long photo project, capturing the everyday lives of five asylum seekers and their families in new york, as they navigate living in shelters, looking for work and housing, tending to their families, and grappling with the risk of deportation. 

when the second trump administration began enforcing its mass deportation campaign, the lives of these families were upended, along with thousands of others around the country. the fear of being recognized, detained, and deported by ICE agents became a constant, exhausting factor in their daily lives. as the project came to a close, it was no longer safe to publicly share the identities of these families.

as a result, all of the faces in the photographs have been manually altered using a photo-weaving technique to obscure the identities of these asylum seekers. rather than digitally blurring these images or redact them with black boxes, the manual technique is meant to underscore the gravitas behind why these images needed to be altered in the first place. the cuts and weaves interrupt the tenderness of their quotidian life in the same way that ICE raids, state surveillance, and deportation do to the fabric of a family trying to survive. 

if it is no longer safe for asylum seekers to show or celebrate the mundane moments in their everyday lives, then who in america has the privilege of being seen?