I founded and direct Parallax, an independent counter-archiving agency for the image and the archive. It begins from a claim that my work on the disappeared of the Lebanese Civil War, and with Native artists and communities in California, has made difficult to avoid: the archive is never neutral. It is an instrument that decides what is preserved and what is allowed to disappear, and every official record is also a record of what it keeps out. Counter-archiving builds the record that archive will not keep. It gathers material that is scattered, at risk, or excluded; reads the photograph itself as evidence; treats absence and erasure as findings rather than gaps; and leaves authority over what is published with the people the record concerns.
In practice this is a method before it is a technology. Each source is fixed to its provenance with a cryptographic hash and a stated consent condition, photographs are placed in space and time and their sightlines crossed until several views of one place corroborate each other, and nothing is published that consent has not cleared. Findings stay tethered to the sources that support them, with a stated certainty, so that an account can be cited, contested, and corrected. Parallax works at the scale of a researcher, a newsroom, or a community rather than an institution, and with the people closest to the material rather than about them, which is why sovereignty is built into how the work is made and published, not added afterwards. We build our own instruments for this, six in all, source-available and citable.
Three investigations are currently active. Lifta is a photographic resection of Ein Lifta, the abandoned Palestinian village at the northwestern entrance to Jerusalem, crossing vantages from visits in 2016 and 2017 to read its built fabric, terraces, and spring as a record of dispossession set against the archive of its displacement. What the Desert Holds sets a mile and a half of Highway 111 through Mecca, an unincorporated farmworker community in the Eastern Coachella Valley, against the same highway through Palm Desert, reading photographs by Dorothea Lange and Ernest Lowe Dunn and an original survey of 103 images alongside CalEnviroScreen and pesticide-monitoring data. The Santa Barbara Channel investigation takes the 2026 seabird die-off as its occasion and asks about the threshold of detectability: the monitoring systems exist and the pattern is documented, yet each event is treated as new. Different in subject and scale, the three share one question, who is made visible, and who decides.
parallaxagency.org