Through the figure of a vagrant boy—alone, adrift, and searching for a place that doesn’t exist—the photographs follow a young man as he moves through dim alleyways and desolate corners of Chicago. Vulnerable, directionless, and emotionally displaced, each scene is staged but deeply felt. He sees no space for himself in the structures around him. Unlike Kurland’s imagined communities of care, this boy finds only hardness: asphalt, fences, garbage, brick. He wanders a landscape shaped by capitalism and competition, where every surface feels indifferent or hostile. There’s a quiet rebellion here—a sadness edged with defiance. He resists not through protest, but by refusing to perform, to assimilate, to belong.

I made this work with a close friend—another outsider. He’s a Mexican immigrant, I’m an Arab one; both of us grew up in the U.S. during times of heightened hostility and exclusion, shaped by lineages and identities often vilified or reduced by American culture. We came from financially unstable backgrounds, carrying that quiet, constant pressure. Neither of us fit the masculine ideal—physically unimpressive, uninterested in sports, never dominant in the ways boys are taught they should be. Socially, we hovered on the outside—sometimes shut out, sometimes shutting ourselves out first, internalizing narratives that told us we didn’t belong. We shared struggles with anxiety, depression, anger. We walked these alleys together, talked through frustrations, sharing our black humor. We dumpster dove behind thrift stores, collecting forgotten objects: vintage art books, cowboy hats, old comics, weird toys—fragments of a discarded American past. The cowboy hats, especially, pointed to some fragmented solitary version of masculinity we half-mocked, half-identified with and aspired to. We bonded over heavy music, strange films, darker art. We didn’t see ourselves in media, and definitely not in success stories. For boys and men, our journey and struggle often takes the shape of isolation. We’re taught to dominate, to compete, to chase money, sex, power—and we weren’t living any of that. What lingered instead was a low, persistent sense of failure, and the expectation to survive it alone. We were scavenging, surviving on the edges of Chicago. Our lives mirrored the marginality we were staging: disconnected from wealth, whiteness, or traditional masculinity. The boy in these images isn’t just alone—he’s been left behind by a system that rewards dominance and performance.

This work is about the fragile, complicated interiority of boys we’re rarely taught to recognize—especially within a hyper-individualistic, marginalizing society. It’s about those who do not win. Those left to figure things out alone. Who feel they were born to lose—not because of personal failure, but because of the weight of class, racial discrimination, and systems stacked against them. Because the cultural narratives around them never accounted for them—or actively preyed on them.