Echoes

For years, we have spoken about education as if it were a door. Study hard, and it will open. Walk through it, and another world waits on the other side. Over the past two decades, that door seems to have opened wider than ever. Universities have expanded, classrooms have filled, and millions more students have entered higher education. From a distance, the numbers tell a hopeful story: more seats, more degrees, more possibilities. But numbers can hide the people standing out

At 7:42 p.m., the windows of an apartment building begin to glow one by one. From the street, each rectangle reveals only a fragment: someone cooking dinner, an empty desk, a television, two people talking, or simply a curtain. I photographed this building repeatedly because I was interested in how little we know about lives happening physically close to our own. Hundreds of people can live within the same structure, separated by walls only a few inches thick, while experienc

At first glance, these strands appear to be ordinary beads, arranged by color and shape. Yet their uneven surfaces, cloudy transparency, and irregular forms suggest something less polished and more fragile. What the Water Left Behind explores how objects can carry traces of places they once belonged to. The blue, clear, and coral-colored pieces resemble fragments shaped by the ocean: sea glass, shells, and materials gradually softened by water and time. Once separated from th

It took twenty-three attempts to take a photo that looked effortless. In the first one, my eyes were closed. In the fifth, I hated my smile. Around the tenth, we changed the angle because the background looked too crowded. By the fifteenth, my friend was getting impatient. Eventually, we found one. It looked casual, which was funny because almost nothing about taking it had been casual. I adjusted the brightness, cropped out someone behind me, and stared at the photo for anot

There is an empty chair at our dinner table that nobody talks about. It belonged to my older sister before she left for college. For most of my childhood, she sat across from me every night. She talked more than everyone else, stole food from my plate, and somehow always managed to turn dinner into an argument or a joke. After she left, the chair stayed. At first, my parents kept putting things on it: unopened mail, grocery bags, my dad’s jacket. Slowly, it stopped looking li