April 17, 2026

During the summer of 2015, I began #RacismIsASickness with a camera and a question. The project brought me into collaboration with fourteen people in Philadelphia over six weeks, where I worked to develop a visual language for how racism is experienced, interpreted, and carried.

Rather than simply documenting racism, I was interested in how symbols—such as inverted flags and masks—might hold and communicate its emotional and social weight.

Looking back, I realized that my camera functioned as a tool that unlocked a portal—not only into systems of oppression, but into the ways people respond to them, move within them, and sometimes exceed them in ways that are not immediately visible.

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After selecting two central symbols for the project—the inverted flag and the surgical mask—I began to notice them everywhere. What began as a visual language for expressing my understanding of racism became, over time, a way of training my attention. I started looking for these forms in the world, noticing when they appeared in unexpected contexts and documenting those sightings as part of an ongoing practice.

When 2020 arrived and surgical masks became a global reality due to the COVID-19 epidemic, I found myself sitting in a kind of stunned recognition. What had once functioned as symbol had become infrastructuresurgical masks were visible everywhere, unavoidable, ordinary.

In the years between the end of the project and now, I continued to look for flags. I would only document them when they appeared in unusual circumstances or unlikely places. Recently, while searching my archive using “flags” as a keyword, I found at least ten images—including one from 2017—that met that same criteria.

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What I did not anticipate was that the project would not end when the photographs were completed. Instead, it continued as a way of seeing. By the time I had finished the formal body of work, I had already begun to notice how the symbols I had chosen—particularly the inverted flag and the mask—persisted beyond the frame.

Over time, my attention began to follow them. I found myself recognizing flags in unexpected places and circumstances, and documenting those moments as part of an ongoing practice of observation. The work had shifted from production into perception. I was no longer only making images; I was tracking the return of the language I had once used to make them.

***

This way of seeing became its own kind of training. The symbols were no longer only representational—they became signals that shaped how I moved through the world. When 2020 arrived and masks became globally visible, the shift was not simply recognition, it was scale. What had once functioned as metaphor had become infrastructure.

At the same time, the language around race shifted again. The murder of George Floyd brought a global reckoning into view, and conversations about racism intensified across platforms, institutions, and communities in ways that felt both urgent and overwhelming. What I had once approached through image-making was now unfolding continuously in real time, in public, without pause.

Something in me recognized the alignment, but not in a way that felt resolved. It felt more like pressure—like the world had caught up to, and exceeded, the symbolic structures I had been working with years earlier.

***

Recently, I returned to my archive and began searching through my images using “flags” as a keyword. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular—just following a thread of attention that had persisted since the completion of the project.

What I found was that there were more instances than I remembered. At least ten images met the criteria I had been using informally over the years: flags appearing in unexpected places, in moments that did not announce themselves as significant at the time of capture.

One of those images was from 2017.

***

Seeing them together now, I understood something that had not been visible to me in the moment of making them: the project had not ended when the formal work concluded. It had continued as a way of seeing that persisted beyond its original frame.

The symbols I had once chosen had not simply been used—they had trained my attention. And that training did not stop when the camera stopped being active. It continued into how I moved through the world, what I noticed, and what I recognized as worth holding onto.

What I see now, looking across the span from 2015 to the present, is not a finished project, but a sustained way of witnessing. The camera opened a portal into systems of oppression and the ways people move within them, but what remains with me most is how that seeing continued beyond the work itself. It did not stay contained within the work itself.   And in that continuation, I have been able to see—across time—what refused to break.