Texts throughout by Sierra Kiss 
Edited by Sarah Chaplin Espenon
Designed by Lewis Chaplin

144 pages, 70 color & duotone plates, 17 x 23cm
Section-sewn clothbound debossed hardcover

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 examines how American systems of care repeatedly fail the women and children most dependent on them. Made between 2022 and 2025, the project extends Abdulhamid Kircher’s exploration of lived trauma impacted by the intersecting violences of capitalism and domestic insecurity. 

At the center of the book is Sierra Kiss and her young family. A friendship developed after Kircher made portraits of Kiss in her home in Los Angeles. Over the course of the four years they have known each other, Kircher has documented her experience of homelessness, addiction, repeated pregnancies and domestic abuse. The work reveals a broken system of support – from shelters to churches and social services – eroded by chronic underfunding and government policy. When the scaffolding of the world we inhabit fulfills its own promise to keep women in states of dependency and impoverished people in states of powerlessness, how can we expect new generations of healthy, safe and cared for families to flourish?

Kircher’s photographs trace the repetition, exhaustion and confinement that define daily survival as Kiss fights to create a loving and stable domestic environment for her children. Kircher seeks to share her lived experience with all its complexities, contradictions and struggles. Depicting with vulnerability the contours of her life alongside the moments of joy and innocence her children find within circumstances structured to limit them. 

 interweaves texts pulled from Kiss’ Instagram stories that offer a parallel testimony and a powerful internal monologue of her mental health, isolation and resolve as her life goes on. Drawing on Kircher’s ongoing investigation of familial trauma and his own experience as a child to a young mother caught navigating abuse, this book highlights the realities of being born into circumstances that often stem from previous generations and bleed into the next. 

 unfolds as an intimate portrait of survival and resilience within the corrupt and cruel structures of modern capitalism and the American welfare system.