To exist without belonging is to live in a state of perpetual in-betweenness—neither fully here nor entirely there, always at the edge of definition. Portrait Unknown captures this condition in the most literal sense. Faces swallowed by light, erased by the camera’s flash, leaving behind only the suggestion of a presence. These figures drift through their environments—residential streets, parking lots, empty rooms— inhabiting space but never quite a part of it. The world does not reject them outright, nor does it fully embrace them. They remain suspended, lingering like ghosts in places they should call home.

The absence of a face is more than an aesthetic decision; it is a reflection of disconnection. Without features, the subjects become both universal and unrecognizable, their identities washed away in a flood of light. This overexposure is an act of disappearance, an unsettling transformation where the self dissolves into nothingness. This is the paradox of being an outsider—not unseen, but unrecognized. The body remains, yet the person is gone.

Drawing from personal experience, Portrait Unknown is a meditation on displacement, on what it means to stand within a community without ever being truly part of it. Yet in this erasure, there is also a kind of universality. These unknown portraits, faceless and floating, ask us to consider: What does it mean to be seen? And who gets to claim the weight of presence in the places we call home?