This series started as a small personal project: layered portraits of strangers in public spaces done by multiple in-camera exposures. Later, it was commissioned by Harper’s magazine as a photo essay for a May 2015 cover article The Quietest Place in the Universe that deals with a quest for dark matter and illustrates an on-going research on this subject at Sanford Lab in Lead, SD.

  Science and technology made a huge leap in the last few years, and it’s widely predicted that some of our core beliefs about what matter is might be shaken soon, supposedly by a particle or a force that hasn’t even been seen or registered yet.

  Personally, I was interested in the dichotomy between the overwhelming size of our universe and individual self, a sense of wonder and fear, alienation and belonging. Our personal worries and struggles tend to take center stage in our lives so contemplating vastness of the world and how our existence measures up to it can be distressing - and also full of possibilities.

  Full essay is available here.