Widening the Lens explores how we look at images and how images look back at us. Each week, I dig into photography, gender, visual literacy, and visual culture with essays that sharpen how we see the world, plus artist highlights that remind us why pictures matter.
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Simone Weil (1909-1943), French philosopher, mystic and political activist writing in the shadow of Nazi occupation argued that uprootedness was the defining affliction of modern civilization. Not poverty, not war, not even death. Uprootedness. It is a condition written into the forced migration of enslaved people, the systematic destruction of indigenous place and memory, the experience of every immigrant told that their belonging here was never fully guaranteed. Weil believed this severance was not incidental to modern violence. It was the ground in which modern violence grew.
In my own search to uncover a quiet grief tied to loss, I would add the celebrated erasures of women: she who lost her name at marriage, her clan, her land, severed from her own legal existence by an institution designed to root her in someone else's identity rather than her own. This feels more like a knowing, or not knowing, slippery and difficult to name.
In The Need for Roots, Weil identifies money and modern education as self-perpetuating forces that uproot human life. When the nation and money become the only binding forces in society, she argues, the human soul is threatened at its core. What makes this moment particularly acute is that the void left by those lost bonds has not gone unfilled. This state of general unwell is primed for where we are now. A nationalist, white supremacist vision of America has rushed in to offer what uprootedness makes people desperate for: a story of belonging, a named enemy, a sense of inheritance. It is a counterfeit rootedness, one that does not restore what was lost but weaponizes the longing for it, replacing genuine community with hierarchy, and shared fate with enforced sameness.
Returning to Weil has helped me make sense of the deep grief washing over so many of us. In my world, extending outward to colleagues, friends and students, there is the pressing question of what it means to photograph in a country where violence is real and expanding, where surveillance tightens from above, and where the camera is increasingly met with obstruction, threat, and legal consequence. How can image makers visualize what is both unthinkable and invisible? With this in mind, I recently watched Pawel Pawlikowski’s 2013 film Ida for the first time. It follows a young novitiate, abandoned at birth, raised in a convent, who has never known her own history. Days before her solemn vows she meets her aunt, the only surviving member of her family, she learns she is of Jewish birth and that her parents were killed when she was a baby. Ida and her aunt come to know one another as they travel into rural Poland to find out what happened to her parents during the occupation.
The film is masterfully photographed, and each scene is a breathtaking moment of constructed frames, nearly each with big pockets of empty space. In those spaces, emotional energy can be felt, that energy feels something is between wonder, longing, and loss. It is a film built from traces. Pawlikowski never shows the killing. He doesn’t need to and through quiet and still movements on film, the viewer travels through the aftermath of the violence for the entire film. Pawlikowski trusts the viewer to arrive.
The act of not showing is not an absence, rather a method to conjure the past, whose trauma can be very much felt in the present. Towards the end of the film Ida and her aunt watch as her family’s murderer, a simple farmer (who now lives rent free on their ancestral farm) digs in the dirt on the forest floor, to finally reveal the burial place of her parents and the brother she never knew she had. We see very little of the remains, but we feel the dirt, the trees and the forest which begins at the edge of the stolen farm, is a kind of placeholder. It is the final destination of a people who had been declared placeless long before their belonging had been revoked by law and custom, before it was revoked by murder.
Weil believed that uprootedness, once it takes hold, does not announce itself as loss. It announces itself as the new normal. When a town experiences loss due to economy or environmental disaster, and any other calamity however abrupt or slow burning, it experiences itself as a place that is simply getting on with things, making practical decisions, taking the opportunities that come. This is what makes Weil’s concept so devastating as a lens on contemporary America. Uprootedness is not a condition that produces outrage. It produces the quiet disappearance of the conditions that would make outrage possible. So when a detention center, prison, or AI center arrives with its promise of jobs and infrastructure, it may not feel like a community accepting the machinery of state violence into its landscape, it may feel like a community finally getting a shot. Violence does not need to force its way in. It simply fills the space that loss left behind.
What the Light in the Sky Reveals
In the summer of 2018, photographer Marni Shindelman found herself, like so many, unable to look away from the images coming out of the border. The photographs of children screaming as they were separated from their mothers were the kind of pictures that don’t leave you. That fall, at a graduate seminar, she met a friend who had spent her summer supporting pro bono lawyers at the South Texas Family Residential Center in Dilley, Texas. The friend presented a single image alongside her account, a banal photograph of the Texas sky at dusk, and explained simply that it was the view near where she had worked all summer, because no photographs of the facility itself were legal to make. That absence, that deliberately empty sky, became the opening Shindelman walked through.
She immersed herself in the community of volunteers who moved in and out of detention centers across rural America, following them everywhere except inside. One night, on the roof of a ranch house, watching the moon rise over the facility, she made a long exposure of the landscape and saw something the naked eye had missed entirely: a hard line of light cutting through the darkness, radiating miles out from the detention center into the surrounding countryside. That moment led her to more than thirty locations across the country, some as close as a hundred miles from her home in Athens, Georgia.
The result is a substantial and urgent body of photographic work entitled Restore the Night Sky. This series works precisely because it solves the central problem facing photographers in this political moment. The things requiring documentation are the things most aggressively hidden from view or increasingly difficult to photograph. Shindelman finds what cannot be contained by the systems designed to contain it, and she points her camera at that instead.
The detention centers Shindelman photographs are not randomly sited. These are rural towns such as La Estancia, New Mexico, population of approximately 1,343; Folkston, Georgia at the edge of the Okefenokee Swamp, population of roughly 4,500, or Sierra Blanca, Texas, population 544. I cannot speak to what each of these places has lost or still holds. But the pattern of siting, remote, rural, small, is not accidental. Detention infrastructure tends to land where land is cheap, where local economies may welcome the jobs (although those numbers are greatly inflated by developers and politicians), and where distance does its own work of concealment, operating far from the eyes that might otherwise ask questions. Whether or not these communities were already struggling, they were chosen, in part, because they were easy to overlook. Weil would have recognized the logic immediately.
This is the same logic now driving the purchase of AI data centers, fulfillment warehouses, prisons, the entire infrastructure of 21st century capital. They go where land is cheap, where political resistance is minimal, where the operation can run with the least scrutiny.
That normalization of use has a landscape. Pawlikowski understood this about Poland in the 1940s. In his film, the forest does not look like a crime scene, it looks like a forest. The neighbors who simply looked away, did not experience themselves as participants in genocide. They experienced themselves as people trying to survive in difficult times, making practical decisions in a landscape that had been, for years, normalized around the idea that certain people did not fully belong in it.
Shindelman is photographing the same normalization. The light above the detention center in La Estancia does not look like the light above a place of suffering. It looks like the light above any large facility, a warehouse, a factory, a hospital. It is only the long exposure, the camera doing what the eye refuses to do, that reveals the scale of it, ten miles across a desert, written in light on a sky that most people in that town have stopped looking at.
This is the specific work photography is called to do right now. The photographer who shows up when ICE arrives, who stands on the street when the raid happens, who photographs protests, who documents the court house arrests - they are also doing the work of uncovering and exposing. That work is necessary and urgent and increasingly dangerous to do. And the photographer who drives to La Estancia, New Mexico with a tripod and holds the shutter open for minutes in the dark until the sky reveals what the naked eye refused to see. That work is necessary too. Photography must be capable of working at both timescales simultaneously. Neither is sufficient without the other, and the only failure, the only true abandonment of the work, is to stop looking.
When I asked Shindelman what she saw as the most urgent challenge in visualizing the enormity of this moment, and what she might say to emerging photographers or documentary students trying to make that scale legible, she answered simply:
Listen. That is my first lesson. Don’t go into every situation with the intention to make images. Some times and places and spaces are not meant for images for me. They might be spaces of service or care, but not everything is for the image.
When I first went to the Dilley detention center, I went with the intention of not going in, of making photographs of what a lay person could see. I did that because those images don’t feel right to me. It is too easy in our time to flip past horrific images. I wanted to make stunning images that gut punch you after you realize what you’ve been looking at; that detention is right in our backyards.
I trust my visual acuity and process to illuminate the scale. It is terrifying in the field to not know what you are making and to let the story unfold for you as you are making it, but for me, it is my process. Lean into the unknown and the potential for failure, as everything you make or collect is part of a larger process.
Shindelman herself is not finished. “With the rapidly changing political situation,” she writes, “this is an important record of this time, especially when it comes to family detention, which has resumed after being paused by the Biden administration. The same major privatized companies that run these ICE detention centers are currently charged with the mass deportations we are seeing with the Trump administration. I continue to travel to witness these sites, hoping to inspire others to delve deeper and question their own landscapes, and the policies of their own towns.”
Notes:
To learn more about photographer Marni Shindelman and Restore the Night Sky please listen: Texas Public Radio “Detention is Everywhere” Interview
Tell Me How it Ends, Interview with Marni Shindelman by Sarah E. Web.
ICE Detention Statistics as of January 2026
A Blueprint for Resistance: How Residents and Local Governments Are Shutting Down ICE Detention in Warehouses by Erica Bryant
Great essay, love how you thread the different ideas and bodies of work together so well
Another powerful and beautifully constructed post. Illuminating!