Witnessing Through the Lens

My eye!

For over ten years, I’ve been working as a restorative justice coach in New York City public schools and beyond. In truth, I’ve always been in education in some form, but restorative justice gave me language and structure for something I had been drawn to all along: creating spaces where stories can be shared and where people can feel truly seen.

That same thread runs through my photography. Whether I am facilitating a circle in a school or holding my camera in the studio, the question underneath is the same: How do we create spaces where people feel witnessed?

Being witnessed has been one of the most powerful experiences of my own life. To be seen in both my light and my shadow has allowed me to connect more deeply with my essence. It’s no coincidence that my name is Iris—part of the eye.

Bearing witness feels like my calling, whether it happens in a classroom or through the lens of my camera.

I want to share with you the words of my colleague, Mariah, who experienced this first-hand. Mariah and I first met when she joined one of my restorative circle trainings. Later, she stepped in front of my camera for a portrait session. What she wrote afterward about her experience moved me deeply.

Her essay captures something I believe many of us yearn for (certainly something I continue to seek in my own life) : not just to be seen at our brightest, but to be seen in our wholeness—our light and our shadows, our resilience and our tenderness.

Below, I share Mariah’s writing with gratitude. It is both her story and a reflection of the kind of seeing I hope to offer each person who comes into my studio.

Guest Essay

Iris-Seerby Mariah Schwarz

Sept 2024

Mariah Schwarz

Iris-Seer

The morning I went to have Iris take my photograph, I had a broken heart. 

I met Iris in July at a training she was giving. So, my first experience of her was one of great admiration. I was able to witness and experience Iris giving some of her greatest gifts, teaching complex ideas with compassion and sensitivity. Holding vulnerable strangers with care and softness. And holding us all to a challenging but reachable ideal of growth within ourselves and together as a body of souls. 

One can imagine then, that as a professional peer of hers, I would have liked Iris to see me with equal admiration. So, when Iris offered to photograph me I was excited and a little daunted. I have from a young age been told I am awkward in front of the camera, and in general have—also for decades—felt I am unphotogenic. Yet, here was a woman I so greatly admired for her intelligence, experience, intuitive and cultivated ability for compassion and deep understanding offering another of her greatest talents to me, a woman seldom photographed, even more seldom by someone as capable of seeing humanity with such nuance as Iris. 

Finding myself in a car driving across Brooklyn on a sunny, beautiful August morning, holding my coffee and taking deep slow breaths, I was filled with anxiety. I had spent much of the past few days crying and begging for sleep, praying to be released from my own mind, my fears, my scars. Wishing that I could be released from myself. From parts of myself that I do not prize. Shadows in myself I often wish I could chase off forever. Shadows that are my demons.

My eyes had been bloodshot, my skin dry from being washed. I sat in the car—that golden morning sunlight speaking of autumn on a gentle breeze (a preciously beautiful day in a drastically climate changed New York)—shadowed by my appearance that week and the many times I had been told I wear my heart on my sleeve. Something I’ve never contested. That morning the pieces of my heart hung and bled from my sleeves. I felt exposed, exhausted by my demons, vulnerable… my light either dull or doused completely.

How could I—in this state—arrive to have my picture taken, to receive this incredible gift Iris offered to me? The gift perhaps of seeing me… of showing my light to the world. I did not feel capable of receiving what Iris offered because I did not believe I could meet the requirement of showing my brightest self.

The studio door was open, and Iris met me barefoot, holding a partially burned palo santo. She welcomed me in and showed me her space, lighting the palo santo again, and then bringing water and tangerines. We sat down on her comfy, stuffed couch. Ima Nazca was playing.

I had no intention of telling Iris the weight I carried. I had tried across every inch of Brooklyn to breathe through myself, relax, find my center. Yet, it was my center that felt shattered. To see me, would be to see this.

I had no intention of telling Iris what I had been through, and now—only weeks later, I cannot remember quite what I said. I only know that it did not take long, sitting with Iris on the couch, to find myself slowly speaking the words of the past days. And I don’t know how Iris received it all so gently and firmly that I neither cried nor fell apart, but was relieved… lighter somehow despite the weight of what I’d shared now living out in the world where it could be seen and was real, and someone else knew it. Someone I admired. The truth of it could not hide—whatever that truth said about me or my love.

I also don’t know how Iris moved us from this vulnerable exposure to the purpose of the visit. I only remember at one point saying that words are my magic. And not much later, Iris saying I looked beautiful while I spoke. She was right… when I’m talking from the best of myself—as it seemed I had been, I’m not thinking. I’m in the music of the words. And that is how Iris took my picture… while I spoke.

I have often heard myself, people I love, acquaintances, strangers talk about wanting to be seen. Yet all of us—myself included—so often hide, put on masks, tuck away this or that part of ourselves… too often, all of ourselves.

That morning, I was afraid to be seen. To be seen broken, to be seen vulnerable, a shred of myself… to have the world see what my emotions and scars and shadow itself had done to me over the past several days. I did not—I believed—want to be seen. Not the way I was. Not in that state. Not those parts of myself.

So, I have to ask what we really mean when we say we want to be seen. I think it is a special kind of seeing we seek. Something much more nuanced, more tender, more true than is often possible.

I think we want a nuanced and complete kind of seeing. One that means we are understood truly as the best of ourselves, for that which glows within each of us, our unique beauty, strength, power, gifts, light. And yet, I know it is not only that we want another to see the very best in us. We also want—at the same time, in the same instant and extended hour—for the same witness to perceive our shadows, our pain, our vulnerability, even that which has hurt ourselves and others, and see it with compassion. See it as inseparable from the same person that glows, the same person whose magic is held up to the light, inseparable from the very best in us.

We want not just to be seen—but understood in our wholeness and told that all of this is lovable. That not only our light is lovable, but our shadow too. And we want this amazing person who sees us to know that our light is not possible without our shadow. That our light and our shadow are the same being. They are one. We want to be seen completely with love for the complex and complete us. To be known as lovable in our seeming paradox—because we are all that we are.

I think we speak of this experience with such reverence because it is so rare. Rare that we are seen in totality, with all that we are—light and Shadow—understood as one by compassionate eyes that regard us with love, that know we cannot be our light without our darkness. We are not truly seen if only our glowing magic is admired; we are only seen, understood, embraced when we are seen completely and loved for it all. That is our whole human truth.

Sitting in the dark, now autumn, the night cool and a new breeze coming in my bedroom window—I saw in Iris’s photographs of me my broken heart and my incredible capacity for love. And I saw in others my brightness, my shine, my glow. My magic words—silent and still powerful. Iris held the complete me with tenderness and compassion. 

Susan Sontag has said that photographs are different—all other circumstances being equal—depending on who looks through camera. It is not the machine that sees us. For me, it was Iris. She saw and so she can show the world all of me, and she saw, and so she can show all the world that it is all of me that makes me lovable.

Iris held my whole soul with tenderness, and let it be seen.

That is what Iris gives everyone she witnesses. Iris will see all of you and know you are lovable. And then—she shows the world that you are whole and complete and imperfect and dark and light, and beautiful.