This work gathers fifteen years of my father’s mugshots, from 2007 to 2021, alongside fragments of the paper trail that held him—court documents, forms, and signatures that chart his absence in bureaucratic language. A mugshot fixes a person in time, often at their most vulnerable—made for control, not remembrance. For many entangled in systems of incarceration, it becomes the most circulated image of their life, the way they are seen, known, and remembered. For years, these records were the only images I had of him—the only way to watch him age, to trace time through absence.

Animated in a continuous loop, the mugshots collapse into one another, dissolving distinctions between years and between the man and the system that framed him. The later photographs of us together exist in tension with these earlier images: moments of our own making, fragile and defiant in their ordinariness. The work becomes a kind of family album shaped by surveillance and its aftermath, asking what it means to know someone through the traces of their confinement—and what it means to begin seeing them again beyond the archive.