Someplace / Not Here / Still There, But Not began in a hotel room — a space intimate yet anonymous — and evolved into an exploration of solitude, displacement, and belonging. As a first-generation immigrant constantly traveling between Cyprus and the United States, I realized that movement had become my home: a rhythm of departure and return, freedom and repetition.

 

As John Szarkowski observed, photographers are either a mirror reflecting the self or a window onto the world. In this project, the camera becomes both. It reflects my solitude while also observing the quiet disconnection defining contemporary life. Through conceptual portraiture, symbolic objects, and both confined and open spaces, the work traces how alienation and longing inhabit the body and the built environment alike.

 

Structured in five movements — departure and disorientation, dream and chaos, fracture and expression, encounter and expansion, and unresolved silence — the series unfolds like a fragmented narrative. The imagery builds an emotional architecture: a meditation on escape and return, on the desire to connect, and the impulse to withdraw. Ultimately, the work offers no resolution but a lingering — the acknowledgment that to be someplace yet not here is to live between presence and disappearance, still there, but not.