Common Ground: Why These Images. Why This Process. Why Now.

Gordon Parks Photograph, August 1942, his first assignment for the FSA. "Ella Watson, a charwoman employed by the government in Washington, D.C.

Some projects arrive fully formed. This one didn’t.

Common Ground began as a question rather than a body of work. A quiet, persistent wondering about what we still share in a time that feels increasingly fractured. Not politically fractured only, but psychologically and socially divided. Different stories. Different fears. Different ideas of who belongs. I kept coming back to this as I was searching for a bigger series project for 2026.

 
The images at the center of this series were made long before our current moment. Many of them are familiar. Some are uncomfortable. All of them were created in a period when America was struggling with hardship, displacement, labor, identity, and survival. They were made by photographers who believed that looking closely mattered.

 
What struck me was not how different we are now, but how recognizable the human conditions still feel.

 
These photographs exist in the public domain. They belong to all of us. They are part of a shared visual memory. And yet most of us encounter them today as small, flattened reproductions on screens, stripped of physical presence and emotional weight. Common Ground is my attempt to slow them down again. Not to improve them. Not to reinterpret them in a clever way. But to translate them, carefully and deliberately, into a new physical language.

 
Why non-silver processes?

 
I chose to work with non-silver photographic processes because they resist speed and perfection. Gum oil printing in particular is labor-intensive, imperfect, and deeply tactile. Every print is built in layers. Every decision leaves a trace. The process requires patience, attention, and acceptance of variation.

January 1943. "Daytona Beach, Florida. Bethune-Cookman College. Girl welder in the National Youth Administration school." Photo by Gordon Parks, Office of War Information.

This matters to me because these images were never meant to be disposable.

By remaking them slowly, by hand, I am asking different questions of them. What remains when we remove the gloss of modern reproduction. What details surface when time is allowed back into the image. What emotional resonance returns when the photograph becomes an object again rather than a file. Each print in Common Ground will be unique. Even when made from the same source image, no two will be identical. That variability is not a flaw. It is the point.

 
Why Bali?

 
The Bali printmaking residency is not a side trip or an escape. It is a continuation of the same inquiry.

Edward Curtis, photographer. The Rush Gatherer-Kutenai. March 11, 1910

The residency gives me uninterrupted time, focus, and access to a studio environment dedicated to non-silver photographic processes. It allows me to work slowly, without the usual pressures of daily life and production timelines. That kind of space is rare, and it matters when the work itself is about attention and care.

 
There is also something important to me about stepping outside my own cultural landscape while working with deeply American images. Distance creates perspective. Being away from the noise of home often clarifies what we’re actually trying to say about it. The work made in Bali will not be about Bali. It will be about America. About shared labor. Shared struggle. Shared dignity. Shared humanity.

Of course I will document and create images of Bali landscape, architecture and people. I am a creator and observer and I wont want to pass up the opportunity when I am there. I will write about that at a different time. Documenting the process of the image creation and created the Common ground series will be top priority.

How the two projects work together. Common Ground is the body of work.
The Bali residency is the container that makes part of it possible.

Edward Curtis Photograph. At the Water's Edge--Piegan. 1910

They are not separate efforts competing for attention. The residency supports the making of the work. The work gives the residency meaning. One does not exist without the other.

 
Those who support the residency are not just funding travel. They are supporting the slow creation of a physical archive. A series of prints made with care, intention, and respect for the images and the people within them.
This is not a campaign driven by urgency. There is no countdown clock attached to the work itself. The images have already waited decades. They can wait a little longer.

 
What I’m inviting you into.

 
This project is an invitation to pause. To look again. To consider where we came from and what we still hold in common beneath the noise of division. If you choose to follow along, you’ll see the work take shape from selection to printing to finished pieces. If you choose to support it, you’ll help make that slow, deliberate process possible. Here are the prints and support opportunities being offered.

 
Either way, I’m grateful you’re here. These images were made before we were this divided. I’m remaking them slowly, by hand, to see what still holds.