MK Sitoh — Photographs - Part 2. Holding a private life inside public system

My work circles a single question: how do people hold a private life inside the public systems that surround them? Across these images a figure turns inward — to a device, a ritual, a meal, a task — while the surrounding environment closes around them. Between the two there is almost always a thin separation: literal glass, physical distance, negative space, a wall touched but not crossed.

I am interested in how older forms of meaning — faith, labor, ritual and tradition — continue inside modern public life, especially in a world of screens, movement and systems. But I also know that photographing these lives is not neutral. My camera creates distance, and that distance has become part of the work. I want the project to ask not only what I photograph, but how I photograph: how close I stand, who I make visible, and what responsibility my attention carries.

I don't yet want to resolve which thread matters most. These are the questions I intend to keep working — narrowing toward a focused, long-term inquiry while questioning my own position as the one who looks

Girl in traffic

A teenager sealed in a headphone bubble against a wall of moving traffic — a private interior carried through an indifferent public flow.

Through glass

Passengers seen through a rain-streaked window — the separation made literal. The image where the membrane I keep photographing becomes the surface itself.

Lunch in the current

An older man eats from a green bowl as motorbikes stream past — the same inward pocket as the first frame, now carrying age and labour.

Corner meal

A man eating alone in a wide field of empty plaza, architecture pressing in on all sides — solitude shaped by the built environment.

Devotion and the device

A monk absorbed in a smartphone, scripture laid on the ground beside him. Faith and the screen collapse into a single frame — one of the threads I find most generative.

Scale

A man dwarfed by a monumental face, his attention turned away from it — the individual against the overwhelming image.

Watching the time

A gallery attendant in uniform sits beside a vast painting, checking his watch. Inside a space built for contemplation, his attention is on the clock — labour shaped by the place that surrounds it.

Two economies

A cardboard collector hauls her load as a cyclist passes — two ways of using the same path.

The worker's shore

A coastal harvester rests amid her basins and gear on the rocks — self-containment at the margins of a working life.

A life's work

A veteran sea-worker sorts her net, as she has for most of her life. After several images made across distance, this closer frame asks what intimacy, labour and looking require of the photographer.