ISTHMUS

ISTHMUS is an ongoing photographic investigation into Panama, the country where I was born and grew up, and the landscapes that connect me and my family to its history.

On December 31, 1999, I stood between my parents in a crowd gathered for the handover of the Panama Canal. I was six years old and deeply annoyed. As the speeches dragged on, I began eating the grass beneath my feet.

My mother had grown up in a country where she could not freely set foot on that land. For most of her youth, the Panama Canal Zone was an enclave governed by a foreign power, cutting through the heart of Panama. That night, as fireworks marked the beginning of a new millennium, the Canal was formally returned to Panama. I did not yet understand sovereignty, treaties, or geopolitics. I only knew I was tired of waiting.

ISTHMUS begins there.

Panama has always been shaped by its geography. Roughly three million years ago, volcanic and tectonic forces formed the land bridge connecting North and South America, transforming ocean currents, climate, and biodiversity. Since then, the isthmus has remained a site of connection and rupture, shaped by colonialism, global trade, foreign intervention, and the infrastructures built upon it.

ISTHMUS is an ongoing photographic investigation into Panama, the country where I was born and grew up, and the landscapes that connect me and my family to its history. The project examines how national identity is shaped by sovereignty, inequality, environmental pressure, migration, labor, and the country's strategic position within global trade.

In 2025, renewed U.S. rhetoric around the Panama Canal, including President Donald Trump's suggestion that the United States could “retake” control of the waterway, brought questions of sovereignty and historical memory sharply back into public consciousness. For many Panamanians, history can feel cyclical.

I approach Panama from a dual Panamanian and German background, moving between an intimate familiarity with the country and a consciousness of how it is viewed from abroad. Panama is often reduced to its function: a canal, a bridge, a logistical corridor. ISTHMUS looks instead at what exists beyond that infrastructure and asks who gets to belong within the national story.

The project moves through urban neighborhoods marked by inequality and protest, Indigenous territories negotiating a changing climate and economic marginalization, landscapes transformed by extraction, and sites where historical memory remain embedded in the present.

Rather than photographing Panama solely as a geopolitical or economic asset, I am interested in the people and landscapes that make the country what it is. Who is remembered, and who remains invisible? Whose labor sustains the circulation of global trade? What does sovereignty mean in a country whose geography guarantees perpetual foreign interest?

At its core, ISTHMUS is also concerned with fragility. The isthmus itself was formed through rupture, volcanic and tectonic pressure forcing matter upward until a bridge emerged. In this sense, fragility and formation are inseparable.

I think again of that child eating grass at the millennium. What felt like boredom was, in retrospect, an encounter with historical time. The land beneath me had reorganized oceans; it had been partitioned, occupied, invaded, and reclaimed.

ISTHMUS is my attempt to stand still on that land and look closely: not at the ships passing through, but at the ground itself, and at the people who have always lived upon it.