home | about | collection | giving | museum catalogs | exhibits | inspire

by: Mustapha El Basri

In our cities, certain lives exist as whispers—present but unheard, visible yet unseen. Echoes of the Unseen invites us to pause in that threshold between looking and truly seeing, between proximity and presence.

Mustapha El Basri's portraits emerge from moments of profound human exchange: the quiet negotiation of trust between photographer and subject, the shared vulnerability of being witnessed. These are not images of documentation or diagnosis. They are collaborations—acts of recognition that restore what society so often erases: the inherent dignity of each person before the lens.

In photographing individuals experiencing homelessness and addiction, El Basri refuses the familiar narratives of despair or spectacle. Instead, his camera lingers in stillness, allowing his subjects to inhabit the frame with agency and presence. What surfaces is not the weight of circumstance alone, but the persistence of selfhood—the inner life that endures despite, and sometimes because of, what has been endured.

The exhibition's title speaks to a paradox: how can the unseen echo? Yet this is precisely El Basri's project—to amplify what exists in the margins of our collective attention, to give resonance to absence. Each portrait asks us to reckon with our own habits of sight, with the ways we move through the world blind to those whom systems of neglect have rendered invisible.

These photographs do not offer easy answers or comfortable resolutions. They ask us instead to sit with complexity, to honor the wholeness of each person who cannot be reduced to a single story or moment of crisis. The strength of this work lies in its refusal to sentimentalize or to turn away—it holds space for both hardship and resilience, for isolation and connection, for all that remains unspoken yet deeply felt.

Echoes of the Unseen is ultimately a meditation on empathy as radical act. It challenges us to acknowledge not only the humanity of those we encounter here, but our shared fragility and grace. In bearing witness to these lives, we are reminded: to be seen is a form of care, and recognition itself can be an act of restoration. Perhaps these images will change how we see those we pass on our streets—moving us from passive observation to genuine acknowledgment.

View these images with patience, listen to what they hold beyond their surfaces, and carry their echoes with you long after you leave.

Photography Gallery
Oct 31st - Nov 29th 2025
Reception: Sun Nov16 th 2-4pm

300 South Thomas Street , Pomona, CA 91766