Visible / Invisible

2017 — Ongoing

Visible / Invisible is an ongoing photography and writing project exploring immigration, belonging and the ways people are understood through ideas of nationality and identity.

The project began in 2017, during the political climate surrounding Brexit and the first Trump administration. I photographed and spoke with people living in London whose experiences of migration differed considerably: people who had moved by choice or necessity, people who had built lives across more than one country, and people whose sense of home could not easily be contained within a single nationality.

At the centre of the work is a question: when does an immigrant stop being an immigrant? Is it determined by citizenship, the length of time someone has lived somewhere, the place they call home, or by the way they continue to be perceived by others? Through portraiture and conversation, the project considers the distance between official definitions of belonging and the more complicated ways belonging is experienced.

I am now returning to the original photographs, writing and participants to consider how their lives and perspectives may have changed in the years since the project began. Each participant is presented through a sequence of photographs alongside an individual chapter developed from their story and experiences. Their chapters can be read by selecting their name beneath each photographic series, allowing the project to move between portraiture and personal testimony while keeping each participant’s experience distinct.