I didn’t notice them at first. That’s the uncomfortable truth.

The floors were always clean when I arrived. The trash bins never overflowed. Lunch was ready on time. When something broke, it was already fixed by the next day. These things felt automatic, like the building took care of itself. But of course, it didn’t.

This project started when I realized how strange that was.

I walk the same hallways every day as the janitors, cafeteria staff, and maintenance workers, yet I rarely looked at them closely. Not out of disrespect, but out of habit. Their work had blended so perfectly into my routine that it disappeared. That’s when I decided to follow the work instead of the spectacle.

The photographs focus on small, ordinary actions: mopping an empty corridor, lifting heavy trash bags, washing dishes long after lunch ends, fixing something no one will ever thank them for fixing. Nothing dramatic happens in these frames. No climax, no performance. Just repetition, patience, and physical effort.

That ordinariness matters.

In Where’s Waldo?, Waldo isn’t hidden—he’s right there. We miss him because everything else feels louder. These workers are the same. They are visible, present, essential, yet easy to overlook because their labor keeps things running quietly. When something works, we stop asking how.

I chose black and white to strip the images down to gesture and movement. Hands, backs, tools, posture. I arranged them in a grid because that’s how the institution functions: piece by piece, task by task, day after day. One image doesn’t carry the weight alone. Together, they show a system held up by people we rarely name.

This series isn’t about pity or heroism. It’s about attention.

Photography, at its simplest, is deciding where to look and where not to. By pointing the camera here, I wanted to pause the automatic glance—to make myself, and others, stay a second longer. To recognize that the comfort and order we rely on come from real bodies doing real work, often without acknowledgment.

Finding Waldo, for me, meant noticing what had been there the whole time.

And maybe asking a harder question: what kind of community are we, if the hands that hold it together remain unseen?