In the day’s fading light, I drive along the spine of Rt. 6A to Dennis, destined for the Cape Cod Museum of Art, to see photographer Julia Cumes and her collaborator, Lipe Borges, photography show, Invisible Threads: Portraits and Stories of our Global Neighbors. It’s not just the images I’m there to see, but an evening presentation with the artists, along with many of the immigrants whose images fill the room I’ve just entered.
The exhibition space is already crowded with people there to see the show before we shift to the auditorium. I move between the portraits, each infused with lighting that creates a unique color palette. They are exquisitely staged. Purposeful. Deliberate. The opposite of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment,” but just as powerful. One by one, I drink in their faces and bodies and clothing and stances and myriad objects in the settings that surround. Then I step to the side to read the detailed narrative of each person, their story past and present, that accompanies each portrait. I recognize the subjects milling around me.
Julia and Lipe leaned hard on lighting to set up the shoots, and harder on the stories the subjects wanted to tell. This is thing that is most striking: the agency afforded the subjects of the portraits. How do you want to be portrayed? For the arborist Eugene from Belarus, it is sitting under the branches of a miraculous weeping beech tree illuminated against the darkness of the night. What do you want to convey? For Kenard from Jamaica, who found his calling as fashion designer during COVID, it must be exuberance and style. What should be in the frame? For Aqela, the seamstress from Afghanistan, the shot should include, subtly, in the dark background, the dresses her daughters wore when all three fled over the mountains to escape an Islamic Party that forbade the girls be educated. Who should be in the frame? For Tony and Joelle, it must their daughters, the older one who’d come with them from the Democratic Republic of Congo, where Tony had been arrested and tortured for his photographs of war crimes, but also the younger one, a baby named Faith who is the family’s first American citizen. Her parents and older sister hold her, arms and hands creating a tangled web of support that cradles the baby, an offering to the possibility of future. As every child is.
I met Julia when we both became Community Impact Fellows at Boston University this fall. How had our paths not crossed earlier on the Cape? Originally from South Africa, Julia washed ashore on the Cape, (that’s the expression—“washashores”—for those of us not here for generations) back in 2000 for a summer photojournalism internship at the Cape Cod Times. Then 9/11 upended her early career plans, and she just… stayed. She’s traveled with her camera all over the world, focusing her lens on the impact of natural disasters and efforts at wildlife conservation and the plight of girls in India. She was named Cape Cod’s Artist of the Year for 2024. Lipe, too, has photographed around the world and won multiple accolades. Here they are, outside the museum:
After the crowd settles into the auditorium downstairs, Faith, now a toddler, sings through the night’s presentation, her babbling as background as Julia describes the first formative experience that taught her the power a photo could contain. When she was a child in apartheid South Africa, the morning paper showed up with a large blank white space amid the black and white newsprint. It was so strange. She had never seen a blank square in the middle of the newspaper pages before. When she asked her father why it was there, he told her it was supposed to be a picture of Nelson Mandela, the imprisoned anti-apartheid leader, whose image was forbidden, anywhere, anytime. In protest, the paper left a blank space where his photo should have been, it’s absence perhaps as powerful as the image itself. Her child’s mind took note.
Tony calms Faith momentarily before her wriggles return, as the immigrants who are my Cape Cod neighbors share their stories. Those at the front of the room remind the audience that the way to resistance against unbound authority is though connection between people. Repeat over and over how thankful they are to be here. How much they appreciated when the storekeeper helped them with a grocery list when they were a nanny years before, when English words were still being collected. Or when someone just smiles at them, which is seeing them. Just a smile can convey you recognize that someone has a reason to exist, there, with you, in the community you share.
They are so hope-filled, grateful for the opportunities this country has afforded them. But when an audience member asks about the impact of this administration on their lives, other stories emerge. The people who’ve been disappeared from the Cape, transferred between ICE detention centers and allowed 20-second calls to spouses. Last known location: California.
We’re against human trafficking, says Michael, a Brazilian. How is breaking up families and stealing people away from their communities, people who are here legally, not human trafficking? The question hangs in the air.
And Lipe speaks of fear. Fear he lived with back in Brazil. Fear that receded when he came here. Fear that has returned in the last—good god, has it only been?—eight months.
I come home from the event and throw together a late dinner, quintessential Italian pasta, noodles that may have originated in China swirled with a sauce made from tomatoes, whose origin is the Andes Mountains of South America. As long as humans have existed, we have moved between places, seeking, always seeking, and bringing along a part of us, leaving part behind. Long before the borders were laid down. Transgressed.
I sit down at the kitchen table with the book I’m reading, Omar El Akkad’s One Day, Everyone Will Always Have Been Against This.
I am still thinking about images. Their power. The cover of the book is a minimal drawing of a bomb descending directly onto a girl who looks up at it, peace fingers of her right hand reaching towards the source of her destruction, a disintegrating bouquet of flowers hanging low in her left hand, petals already scattered on the spot where her life will momentarily end. Omar opens with a story of men pulling a young girl the color of fog from the rubble of what once was her home in Gaza. He then writes of his own daughter, at home in Portland, Oregon, building a city in the hallway of their home, Omar’s sixteenth, or seventeenth, home. He’s lost count. She is imagining worlds into existence as other worlds are ceasing to exist.
Omar, born in Egypt, was forced to leave when it became too unsafe for his family. His is a story of leaving, and leaving again. Egypt. Qatar. Canada. United States. Stories of police at border crossings or just on the street asking for his father’s papers. Tearing them up. Each attempt at moving between nation-states in search of a better life fraught and dangerous. But necessary. To find a place where fear can be set aside. To simply find a job. To not-so-simply find a better life for one’s offspring.
Immigrants arrive to new nations and take the work that is available to them, often well below their skill set. They are invisible to the already settled, the people whose forebears were once the hungry seekers, too. He writes of witnessing a fender bender in Qatar, where 90% of the population is from some other nation, there to build and clean and care for the dominant minority. The Southeast Asian at the back was at fault. The Mercedes in front driven by a Qatari. The response was a sandal-pummeling of the darker Asian man, who cowered in fear, by the less dark Qatari man, who was enraged.
“It came to me a long time later that the Southeast Asian man had done something worse than dent a fancy car’s bumper. He had violated the bounds of his assumed nonexistence. In this place, at this time, people who look like him were to be invisible. They could perform labor and be paid wages, but as vessels of agency beyond the most necessary transactions, they quite simply did not exist. They were not subhuman, they were non-human, non-anything.”
He was only sixteen, but the memory shaped Omar’s world view. Who is allowed to exist in a place only if they remain invisible? And how much rage is allowed those when the veneer slips?
“It is a hallmark of failing societies, I’ve learned, this requirement that one always be in possession of a valid reason to exist.”
This book should be required reading. Everyone should attempt to answer a question Omar poses: “How does one finish the sentence: ‘It is unfortunate that tens of thousands of children are dead, but…’”
Is it possible? It is impossible. There is no ending to the sentence. Because, he writes:
“There’s no such thing as someone else’s children.”
Julia and Lipe’s photos are gorgeous, full of pride and hope and aspiration and accomplishment. This is one true story necessary to see. Omar’s words turn, instead, turn to the darkness, children’s bodies turned to red paste, and demands we look at that, too.
And looking to the south, Hurricane Melissa slowly moved across Jamaica yesterday, one of the strongest storms ever recorded in the Atlantic. A Category 5 at landfall, but with gusts recorded at 190 mph, there is another invitation to create new categories for storms in this new warm world. More people will be on the move.
“To see what is in front of one’s nose,” wrote George Orwell in 1946, “needs a constant struggle.”
Journalists & writer friends, take note…
Are you a local journalist wanting to learn how to incorporate science into your general beat reporting? Check out the Science Reporting Navigator, a new interactive toolkit from The Open Notebook and the Reynolds Journalism Institute.
Mongabay is hiring for a Contributing Editor – Ocean Desk, an Engagement Editor, and a Wire Reporter – Asia.
Bookmark Climate.us, where the disappearing government climate data will continue to live.
And if you know of a federal dataset that has vanished, report it here. (Sorry: deadline is tonight at midnight!)
And from the Department of Good News…
As the climate crisis quickens, so do the means of communication & mis/disinformation. We’ll be wrestling with how to move forward at the MISI Summit: Communicating Climate, Fri. Nov. 7 at Boston University. Featuring Michael Grunwald, Cass Sunstein, Ethan Zuckerman & so many more, including lil ole me in conversation with Andrew Revkin and Ian Cheney, moderated by David Abel. Join us! Free but registration required.
I have benefitted from multiple fellowships from places that have trained me to do the work I do, better. Metcalf Institute is one of them, an incredible leader in science, journalism and science communication. I’m honored to be featured as they kick off an alumni newsletter, talking about the new book, A Better World Is Possible: Global Youth Confront the Climate Crisis.
Coda…
People are on the move, but so are birds. Take a deep breath and watch how they are the inhale and exhale of a planet.
This is lovely, Meera. Thank you.