Ongoing series · 2015 —

What Holds Us Together

What Holds Us Together is an ongoing series photographed across eleven countries, from Varanasi to Los Angeles, looking for the gestures that repeat wherever people share space: carrying something together, eating at the same table, embracing in public, holding on to what they believe in.

These are the gestures Georges Perec called the infra-ordinary: so common that they become invisible, so constant that they hold everything. None of these photographs were taken as part of a planned story. They accumulated over more than a decade of walking through cities, and it took years to see that they had been describing the same thing all along. A thermal bath in Budapest and a sacred river stage the same ritual. A card game in Istanbul and a family meal in Querétaro are the same conversation.

The series also makes room for what happens at the edge of the group: a girl climbing away from the crowd, a woman at ease in her own company. Being able to step aside, and to return, is part of what binds us too.