Made between 2022 and 2025, Abdulhamid Kircher's New Genesis follows Sierra Kiss and her young family through homelessness, addiction, and domestic instability in Los Angeles — a four-year archive of survival within the American welfare system's chronic failures.
The project began with portraits. A friendship developed. Over four years, Kircher documented Kiss's experience of homelessness, addiction, repeated pregnancies, and domestic abuse — tracking the repetition, exhaustion, and confinement that define daily survival as she fights to create a loving and stable domestic environment for her children. The photographs do not reduce this life to its crises. They hold it in full: the moments of joy and innocence her children find within circumstances structured to limit them, and the structures themselves — shelters, churches, social services — eroded by chronic underfunding and policy that mistakes management for care.
New Genesis examines how American systems repeatedly fail the women and children most dependent on them. 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? The question is not rhetorical. It is the formal logic of the project — a logic that Kircher extends into the structure of the book itself, interweaving texts pulled from Kiss's Instagram stories as a parallel testimony and internal monologue.
Kircher (b. 1996) was born in Berlin to German and Turkish parents and immigrated to the United States at the age of eight. His work is a living archive of place and people, drawing on his own experience as a child to a young mother caught navigating abuse. New Genesis builds on his debut monograph Rotting from Within, published by Loose Joints in 2024. Drawing on Ursula K. Le Guin's speculative frameworks for worlds where fragility, transformation, and survival coexist beyond binary oppositions, the project unfolds not as documentation but as dedication.
New Genesis is a book about what it costs to hold a family together inside a system designed to prevent it. Kircher depicts with vulnerability the contours of that life alongside the moments of clarity and love that persist within it — a photography of survival that refuses to make survival look clean.
