It was in March 2015 that I noticed for the first time a missing person’s poster. I was waiting for the tube in London. I stared long at that face in the poster, trying to memorize it, wondering whether I could later recognize it. That evening, I began an intense and emotional journey as I became obsessed with the ongoing search for a boy who disappeared thirty-five years ago.

K was a sixteen-year-old boy living in the south of London. One night in March 1986, he walked out of his house to visit the local grocery store. He was never seen ever since. Twenty-nine years later, I was standing in front of his house, only to discover that not only he has disappeared, but the neighborhood he once knew has likewise vanished. His family no longer owned his home. His school was demolished. The store is now a restaurant. Even the police station where he was reported missing is no longer operating.

My experience studying documentary photography in London that year was centered around my investigation of this cold case. I was collecting archival material from newspaper snippets, police documents, missing persons’ appeals, and blog posts discussing K’s unresolved disappearance. I was particularly struck when I discovered the ongoing search led by K’s younger sister. Until today, she continues to spread appeals hoping for closure, hoping to see her now assumed fifty-one-year-old brother.

The curiosity driving my research led me to philosophical readings about sight, invisibility, and not knowing. As I  wondered about how the search is for both a sixteen-year-old boy and a fifty-one-year-old man, I was reading about Schrödinger’s cat and the state of quantum superposition. And when I encountered the age-progressed computer-generated portrait of K, I was reading about the mythical Gorgons with faces that no one can look at. The more I delved into such contemplations, the more I returned to the same question: What truly lay at the centre of my obsession?

My journey, which began in the south of London in the winter, brought me to the Sinai peninsula in Egypt in the summer. There, I was retracing a mystical tale I had read in the Quran: The collapse of a mountain in the presence of Moses who asked to see a glimpse of God, despite being allowed to hear Him. At the centre of this tale, I  saw the human dependence on sight, in spite of which faith is paradoxically formulated. In juxtaposition, the ongoing search for K by his younger sister with appeals featuring his age-progressed face became a reflection of the strength of faith in the face of uncertainty.

By the end of my study in London, I had put together several publications. I made seven zines, each exploring an aspect of K’s case. I designed two booklets titled The Search for the Invisible In a Space of Infinite Possibilities I and II. In Part I, I curated the archival textual and visual research material I had been collecting. For Part II, I made a series of photographs which I embroidered that retrace the search for K. With the embroidery, I invited the reader to reveal the photographs hidden behind the threads. As for the tale in Sinai, I juxtaposed it with the case in London in a photobook titled The Invisible: Faith as a Phenomenon. In their totality, these handmade books acted like a research dossier that reflected my obsession with what it means to search for what the eye cannot see.

Six years later, I decided to revisit these publications with the intention to transform their essence into a concise narrative. Instead of several booklets that reflect the complexity of this multi-faceted project, I wanted to design a new book that would invite a more immersive experience. And so, I began to conceptualise the book’s form, layout, and binding technique. I re-edited the photographic narrative, focusing on how best to interweave the tale from Sinai with the case from London. I reworked the epilogue’s essay and wrote a story narrated from the perspective of a mountain to illustrate the mystical tale. Then, I focused particularly on further developing the embroidering concept.

With a Stitch-Me edition for the resulting book titled Let My Eyes Have a Glimpse of you, I am inviting the readers to embroider the photographs themselves. Using red thread referring to what the missing boy was wearing,  the embroidery accentuates areas within the photographed scenes. It acts as a tactile invitation to imagine what may have happened in this cold case. As the book readers engage with the intimate and time-consuming practice of stitching, I hope they reflect on the long and difficult journey traveled by those longing for years to see the faces of their loved ones.

Sara Sallam (1991) is an Egyptian multidisciplinary artist, designer, visual researcher, and book maker based in the Netherlands. She works with photography, video, and writing, often re-appropriating and manipulating archival material to invite hidden meanings to emerge. Themes of absence, loss, and longing run throughout her work in which she explores ways of visualizing things we cannot see and portraying people we can no longer meet.

If you’d like to learn more about Sara’s work, visit her website, subscribe to her free newsletter, or join her on Patreon to read similar insights into her process.

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