Parallax is an independent counter-archiving agency for the image and the archive, which I founded and direct. It works from a simple premise: the archive is never neutral. Every official record is also an instrument, deciding what is preserved and what is allowed to disappear, what is made visible and what is suppressed. Counter-archiving builds what that record will not hold: it gathers what is scattered, at risk, or kept out; reads the image itself as evidence; holds absence and erasure as findings rather than gaps; and keeps the record under the consent and sovereignty of the people in it.
The method runs in four stages. Gather rescues scattered and suppressed sources, fixing each to its provenance with a sha-256 hash and a stated consent condition. Cross places photographs and accounts in space and time and crosses the sightlines of many until several views of one place locate and corroborate each other, building a navigable image complex from a dispersed corpus. Hold absence treats what was destroyed, withheld, or erased as part of the record itself, a finding rather than a gap to conceal; where the document is missing, testimony anchored in place stands in its stead. Keep sovereign publishes only what consent clears, with authority over the record remaining with the people documented rather than with the agency. Restricted material, the identities of sources, and unsafe locations are withheld from anything published by the architecture itself, not by anyone's vigilance.
This work happens at the scale of a single researcher, a newsroom, or a community, not an institution, and with the people closest to the material rather than about them. That posture follows directly from the two threads running through my own research, on the disappeared of the Lebanese Civil War and on Indigenous digital stewardship under data sovereignty principles, where the question of who controls the record is inseparable from the question of what the record contains.
Parallax builds its own instruments for this work, six in all: Sightlines, which resects an incident or a site from crossed photographic sightlines; Atlas, which draws many images of one place, object, or event into a single relational field; Situated Testimony, which anchors a spoken account to a model and a map, statement by statement; Verification, a workbench for testing whether an image is what it claims to be; Groundtruth, which compares satellite imagery of one place across time to measure what changed on the ground; and Casebook, which binds the other five into one investigation on a shared map, timeline, and register of findings. Each is source-available, citable, and runs client-side with no server and no account required to view a published investigation.
Current investigations include Lifta, a photographic resection of Ein Lifta, the abandoned Palestinian village at Jerusalem's northwestern entrance, reconstructed across visits eleven years apart; the Santa Barbara Channel investigation into recurring mass seabird mortality events, which argues that the forensic subject is the gap between existing monitoring infrastructure and any integrated rapid response, not cause of death in isolation; and What the Desert Holds, a comparative study of environmental racism along a stretch of Highway 111 through the unincorporated farmworker community of Mecca, read through historical photography and current environmental health data. Every finding across these investigations stays tethered to the sources that support it, built to Berkeley Protocol evidentiary discipline and to be cited, contested, and corrected.