What Evan Are You explores self-identity through the lenses of heritage, class, social stigma, and belonging. My wife and I come from a mixed background — English, alongside two other ethnic groups that have faced deep persecution throughout history and into the present day.
Growing up mixed-race often brings a complex sense of displacement. You never truly belong to any one cultural environment — especially when parts of your own family reject you. That absence of acceptance can create a profound loss of identity. From an early age, I felt disconnected from the idea of belonging. My family life was fragmented, and the notion of home — a place of safety and rootedness — was something distant, almost foreign.
One of the greatest challenges of being biracial is the way others perceive you. People define you through their own assumptions — seeing you as too dark, too light, or belonging to a faith or culture that isn’t your own — and then treating you according to those perceptions. It is natural to feel the need to assimilate into whichever culture seems most accepted in your surroundings. My wife and I, both as children and adults, have found ourselves concealing the non-English parts of our heritage, pushing them into society’s shadows.
Assimilation is not only cultural — it is also class-bound. Growing up, there was a constant negotiation between where we came from and where we were expected to fit. Class became another mask: a learned language, a posture of belonging that often betrayed the reality beneath it. To “fit in” meant suppressing accents, mannerisms, or references that revealed difference. The performance of class, like race, became another way of survival — a strategy to move safely through spaces that were never built for us.
This mirrors the experience of our ancestors in the 20th century, who also hid their identities within their own communities — or fled into Europe’s forests and mountains, seeking refuge from persecution.
Within this work, identity is not fixed — it moves, collides, and transforms. Each portrait becomes a site of friction between how we see ourselves and how others see us, between concealment and revelation, belonging and exclusion. The images operate as both record and invention: they expose the masks we wear and the truths that slip through.
What Evan Are You situates personal history within broader cultural collisions — between heritage and modernity, visibility and erasure, survival and self-expression, privilege and marginalisation. In doing so, it invites viewers to confront the shifting boundaries of identity and to consider photography not as a mirror, but as a stage where identities meet, clash, and ultimately, reimagine themselves.
