At the centre of Abdulhamid Kircher’s latest photo book, New Genesis, is his friend Sierra Kiss and her young family. The book is, in part, a love letter to a friend in need, bearing witness to the complexity of a life impacted by a collision of homelessness, addiction, young motherhood and domestic abuse. It reveals the endless ways American systems of care – from shelters to churches and social services – have been eroded by chronic underfunding and government policy, failing the women and children most dependent on them.

In New Genesis, Kircher presents the same burning directness as his first book, Rotting From Within, and continues to shine a light on the violence of late capitalism and the consequences of domestic insecurity. In collaboration with Kiss, his photographs trace the confinement that defines her daily life as she fights to create a loving and stable domestic environment for her children. Moments of joy and play sit alongside vulnerability and exhaustion. While Kircher is invested in the systemic issues impacting his friend, he resists the grandiosity or saviour complex which often characterises documentary work. Instead, following in the lineage of artists like Nan Goldin and Boris Mikhailov, he devotes his lens to singular stories, creating an intimate portrait of survival and resilience that doesn't shy away from contradiction and complexity.

While Kircher’s uncompromising and unflinchingly honest photographs will likely draw people to this work, it’s the first-person immediacy of Kiss’s writing, running through the entire book, which makes you stay. Her texts, pulled from spoken-word testimonies and short diaristic statements she posts on Instagram, finely layer her emotions and reactions as she navigates life: rage, confusion, fear, fantasy, self-hatred, despair, love and devotion. Kiss’s voice is unique and unapologetic, laced with dark humour and a profound directness, made more potent by the book’s journal-like form. Together, Kircher and Kiss create a line of undeniability, mining the darkest depths of survival with honesty and tenderness. 

Here, Kircher speaks on his friendship with Kiss, the politics of representation and the importance of bearing witness.

How did you and Sierra first meet?

Abdulhamid Kircher: Zoe, my girlfriend, saw Sierra on one of our friends’ Instagram stories. I wrote to her and asked if I could take her portrait. I’d just finished school in San Diego, which was so isolating, and I hadn’t photographed anyone for a long time. The first photographs we made were shot in her hallway with her twins. I don’t remember if she told me what was going on at that first meeting, but I could tell from her energy and seeing her apartment that this person was struggling with something. We connected, and I felt a natural draw to her. 

To date, all of your work has been made in collaboration with friends or family. What was it about Sierra that you felt connected to?

Abdulhamid Kircher: When I’m making work, it’s just following intuition. But over time, I’ve realised that I gravitate to people who have gone through similar traumas to myself or my family. Sierra really reminded me of my mother. Their stories are different, but my mother was also young when she had me; she had no support system and suffered abuse from my dad. When I first met Sierra, she had no one. She had lost her mum to an overdose, and her father was in jail for life.

The work was made between 2022 and 2025. How did your friendship and collaboration develop?

Abdulhamid Kircher: At first, our time together was sporadic. We would hang out, and sometimes I would take the kids to school. Then there was a like six-month period where we didn’t have any communication. She began dating this guy and got pregnant, but he became toxic, harassing and threatening her, and their relationship fell apart. 

When I was reintroduced into Sierra’s life, our relationship transformed into something else. We spent all our time together getting ready for her birth and trying to figure out where she could live. We got much closer. She really just needed someone even more than she did before. There was a different level of urgency. I think a big part of that work was about creating stability for her, me being someone she could rely on to help her take care of the kids, get to doctors’ appointments, and drive her to the hospital during labour. Simple things your friends would do for you. While the work isn’t about me, it was intertwined with me being there for her. 

There is a sense of confinement in both the images and the book’s format. Can you talk about your photographic approach?

Abdulhamid Kircher: I’m really interested in looking at the world from different viewpoints, often switching between different cameras within a single body of work to expand how we feel through images. When shooting, I’m always reaching for the purest form of making, but the final execution always fluctuates. For me, that distinction is really important, and every outcome should be unique to that project. 

New Genesis is a distinct departure from Rotting From Within, and a big part of that is the relationship between your images and Sierra’s writing, which together create a potent, at times excruciating tension between opposing forces: fantasy and reality, stability and vulnerability, calm and chaos. 

Abdulhamid Kircher: I’ve been collecting her writing for like three years now, with over 700 screenshots. She shares it on IG stories but sporadically; sometimes she’ll post like 20 at once, and then there’s none for like a month, and then she goes in again. Including her writing offered a way to reflect what she’s thinking about and her state of mind. 

Sierra’s writing also brackets the work, opening and closing the book with two dark, at times satirical texts that operate from opposing perspectives, disarming the reader upon entry and exit. 

Abdulhamid Kircher: These are from a spoken word video she posted. I remember just crying when I first watched it. It was so powerful. She hammers each line to you. The first text is this sarcastic manifestation, and the closing text is the reality of her situation. Sierra can be humorous at times; it’s her way of coping, and I really wanted to show that side of her. It was about finding a balance between her personality and her lived reality.

For me, the book sits somewhere between a love letter to a friend in need and a mirror of the American care system, which repeatedly fails the women and children most dependent on it. Does that resonate?

Abdulhamid Kircher: Whenever you work with an institution, they always want to find the ‘bigger picture’ to a project as a way of drawing a wider audience to the work. But at its core, this work is really speaking about one person’s experience. I always struggle with broader generalisations, because there are so many women struggling, not getting the help they need, but in this work, I just wanted to be true to Sierra’s experience. I think when you're honest and truthful, people connect to that. 

New Genesis by Abdulhamid Kircher is published by Loose Joints and is available here now.