We SHOW Our Faces, Even When the World Is Trying to Hide Us

This week, as I sat with hours of work compiling stories for the book, All the Genders: Northern Lights, Northern Lives, I felt the weight and beauty of every story again: the grief, the resilience, the strength and the vulnerability wrapped up in the lives of people who have trusted me with their truths. This book is not just a collection of photographs and words. It’s a record of existence; of people who have persisted, against odds that often tried to erase them.

At the same time I’ve been working, horrifying news has been unfolding across the country. Federal immigration agents have been involved in multiple incidents of shootings and force in Minneapolis in the last week, including the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good by an ICE agent and additional uses of force that have ignited protests, community patrol responses, and deep fear among residents. 

In neighborhoods from Minneapolis to the quieter cities where I live on the Virginia coast, people are responding not just with outrage, but with mutual aid networks, community watches, and shared alert systems in a refusal to let violence and fear define their streets.  People are rallying not to harm anyone, but to protect people from being taken without explanation. 

This grim set of accumulating portraits, of people being shot, detained, or disappearing into unmarked vans, is a brutal reminder of how tenuous visibility can feel. When unaccountable power structures operate without transparency, when federal agents are masking their identities and communities feel hunted rather than protected, visibility becomes both a danger and a necessity. 

And that’s exactly what this book is about: being seen.

Not as a monolith. Not as a stereotype. Not as an abstract political talking point. But as real human beings, with faces, stories, histories, connections, communities, flaws and dreams.  We’re not hiding behind masks, except for the armor we create as our own protection when the world gets heavy.  We keep SHOWING our faces in the hopes that it will protect our neighbors, and combat erasure of core parts of ourselves. 

There’s a deep irony here: so much of my work in these pages celebrates visibility, showing faces, showing diversity of gender and culture, at a moment when so many communities feel painted invisible by violence and fear or exposed in ways they did not choose.

So what does it mean to show up?

And what is the power of that visibility,

when the world around us is doing its best to erase us?

For every reclamation of identity, there is resistance. For every person who stands tall and says I am, there is a system looking to reduce, to detain, to silence, to anonymize, or worse.  But we keep showing our faces anyway.  We do it in small ways and big ways: by walking into a protest with allies, by sharing stories in our local communities, by writing letters to lawmakers, by simply living boldly despite the threat of violence.

And by creating art.

Sometimes it feels like the work we do, like writing a book, making a photograph, or speaking our truth – is too small. Sometimes it feels like it barely scratches the surface. But it is not nothing.  

Art is not separate from resistance.

Art is a way of saying:  

I see you.  I hear you.  You are not alone.

Showing up in all these ways, even when it’s painful, even when it feels insufficient, even when the world feels unkind – is how we keep our communities alive.