In Between: The People We Pass (2018-present)

A portrait is often imagined as a sitting, an arranged hour shared between two people. These photographs begin somewhere quieter, in the brief interval when a stranger passes and, for the length of a breath, becomes the whole of what there is to see.

When my partner passed away suddenly, grief arrived with the full weight of each passing day, and over time it widened me, the way a balloon slowly fills until there is room inside for more than one’s own sorrow. In that widened space I returned to these photographs, gathered over many years, and finally began to sit with them, to sequence them, and to listen to what they held. Growing up as an immigrant child in Chinatown, Los Angeles, I learned early the gentle vantage of the outsider, and I have long preferred to stand a little in the shadow, watching with admiration rather than stepping in.

Each photograph is made candidly and from a distance, so that its subject remains wholly within their own moment. The images gathered across my everyday life, my travels, and the long stillness of the pandemic, when ordinary life began to take on new layers of meaning. A woman and a little girl in red wait against a red wall; a violinist plays to a wall of stone; a commuter sleeps while the train carries the city past him. Each meeting asked only for attention.

The series moves within the Western humanist tradition of the street portrait and, beside it, the East Asian spirit of the interval. The character 間 (guan) means between, and infers passage as a form of chapters that show light passing through a gate. Here the gate is a doorway, a bench, a bridge, a seat on a moving train, and the light is whatever a person carries through it.

Nothing here was posed.

Perhaps the people we pass are the ones the day has quietly been waiting for us to see.