Parallax
Parallax · an agency and its case record The instruments [ -> ]

An independent counter-archiving agency for the image and the archive.

We treat images, documents, and sites as evidence: geolocating scattered media, synchronizing them on a shared timeline, and crossing the sightlines of many photographs until several views of one place locate each other.

Every finding stays tethered to the sources that support it. We document and corroborate.

Read the method [ -> ] The investigations [ -> ]
The case record 01South Lebanon 02Lifta 03What the Desert Holds 04Santa Barbara Channel
Fig. 01 · Resection · Ein Lifta
V1 · EXT · 2017 Ein Lifta, West Jerusalem. The abandoned Palestinian village seen from the hillside above, April 2017.
V2 · INT · 2016 Ein Lifta. View from within a ruin, through a stone window frame, to the valley below, May 2016.
FIG. 01 · RESECTION. Two vantages, one site. The exterior sightline surveys Ein Lifta from the hillside above; the interior sightline looks back from within a ruin. Cross them, and a position is fixed. Ein Lifta, West Jerusalem, 2016–17.
01 · The thesis Reading the archive against itself

The archive is never neutral.

An archive is an instrument: it decides what is preserved and what is allowed to disappear, what is made visible and what is suppressed. Every official record is also a record of what it keeps out.

Counter-archiving builds what that archive will not hold. It gathers what is scattered, at risk, or kept out; reads the image itself as evidence; holds absence and erasure as findings rather than gaps; and keeps the record under the consent and sovereignty of the people in it. It is distributed, and built from below.

Parallax does this work with instruments of its own, at the scale of a single researcher or a community, and every claim cites the sources that support it.

The official archivewhat it does
  • −Decides what is kept
  • −Silences what it excludes
  • −Centralizes custody
  • −Waits for the institution
The counter-archivewhat we do
  • +Gathers what was left out
  • +Holds absence as a finding
  • +Distributes custody
  • +Keeps the record sovereign
02 · The method From scattered, suppressed sources to a sovereign account

Counter-archiving.

/ 01

Gather

Rescue the scattered and suppressed

Pull together what is dispersed, at risk, or kept out of the official record. Fix each source to its provenance with a sha-256 hash and a consent state. Distributed, not waiting for an institution to hold it.

  • sha-256 fixity over held bytes
  • Provenance and chain of custody
  • Consent state per source
/ 02

Cross

Read the image as evidence

Place each photograph in space and time, and cross the sightlines of many until several views of one place locate and corroborate each other. The dispersed corpus becomes a navigable archive.

  • Resection by crossing sightlines
  • The image complex of one place
  • Synchronization with honest uncertainty
/ 03

Hold absence

What is gone is part of the record

Mark what was destroyed, withheld, or erased as a finding, not a gap to conceal. Where the document is missing, testimony anchored in place stands in for it.

  • The lacuna recorded, not hidden
  • The disappeared kept in view
  • Memory placed in space
/ 04

Keep sovereign

The record stays with its people

State findings bound to the sources that support them. Publish only what consent clears. Authority over the record remains with the people in it.

  • Findings cited to their sources
  • Published only under consent
  • Sovereignty retained
03 · The discipline

An account that stays tethered to its evidence.

Every source is fingerprinted with sha-256 and keeps its provenance, so the account remains bound to what it came from. Every finding cites the sources that support it, with a stated certainty. The record is built to be cited, contested, and corrected.

The same discipline protects the people and places in the work: restricted material, the identities of sources, and unsafe locations are withheld from anything published, by the architecture itself rather than by anyone's vigilance.

Publicpublished as cleared
Restrictedaliased, coarsened
Embargoedwithheld entirely
04 · Practice Counter-archiving at the scale of a researcher or a community

Independent, and built from below.

We work at the scale of a single researcher, a newsroom, or a community, not an institution, and with the people closest to the material rather than about them. An investigation might begin from a contested site, a dispersed body of photographs, a trafficked or destroyed object, or an archive someone has tried to erase.

The subjects range widely: conflict and its aftermath, land and environmental change, photography as evidence, human rights documentation, and records held under Indigenous data sovereignty. Through all of them runs the counter-archive: building and corroborating the account the official record leaves out, and keeping it citable and open to challenge.

We build our own instruments for the work, source-available and citable: Sightlines, Atlas, and Situated Testimony, six in all.

See the instruments [ -> ]
05 · Work Each investigation is built on the full method: gather, cross, hold absence, keep sovereign

Current investigations.

Case 01

South Lebanon From the border to Saida · 2026

ActiveConflict

An imagery-led reading of the Israeli-led attacks on Lebanon in the 2026 war, beginning in the south. It follows physical change on the ground, in villages and built fabric, health and education sites, places of worship, farmland and tree cover, and heritage, reading each place against a baseline from before the war, taken in the same season. Imagery does not show who acted: attribution of any strike rests on the documentary record, each source named with its status, and the imagery corroborates physical conditions and patterns.

The case has fetched its imagery, tested its pairs for season and sun angle and kept the one that matches, fixed its noise floor before computing any change, set its measures beside UNDP’s building-level counts, and surveyed 38 sources in the legal record. Its page is a draft, not yet public. No finding has been drawn or published. Each measure states its noise floor and what it cannot show: a ten-metre pixel is not a building, and a change in the surface is not its cause. No local verification has been done, and a frame that cannot be read with confidence is withheld, not guessed.

Fig. 02 · Khiam · Sentinel-2 true colour
2025 · 11 Sep Sentinel-2 true-colour view, 5 km across, of the town of Khiam on 11 September 2025: a pale, dense built-up core on a ridge, with scattered settlement to the north, among brown and green fields and rocky hillsides.
2026 · 16 Sep The same view on 16 September 2026: the town centre and the ground south of it look paler and more mottled, with orange-brown patches along a line to the south; the fields to the west are darker and more uniform.
FIG. 02 · KHIAM. Sentinel-2 true colour, 10 m, about 5 km across, on 11 September 2025, before the war, and on 16 September 2026, a year later, after the cessation announced in April and during renewed operations reported in September. The pair is matched for season, and the sun stood about 58 degrees above the horizon on the first date and 56 on the second, so the sun does not account for the difference. In 2026 the town centre and the ground south of it are paler and more mottled, with orange-brown patches along a line to the south, and the fields to the west are darker. At 10 m individual buildings cannot be seen. The pair spans the whole period, so it shows a change in the surface and says nothing of its cause. No total is drawn from it and no local verification has been done. Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data 2025 and 2026.
Case 02

Lifta Ein Lifta, Jerusalem · 2016–17 / 2026

ActiveDispossession

A photographic resection of Ein Lifta, the abandoned Palestinian village at the northwestern entrance to Jerusalem. Vantages from two visits are crossed to reconstruct the site's spatial and temporal condition.

One of the only pre-1948 Palestinian villages in the greater Jerusalem area to survive largely intact, Lifta carries the evidence in its condition: built fabric, cultivated landscape, and spring, a record of dispossession read against the archive of its displacement.

Fig. 03 · Ein Lifta · 2017
Terraces · 23 Apr 2017 Ein Lifta seen across the valley on 23 April 2017: stone houses stepping up a terraced green hillside, with newer buildings along the ridge above.
House · 23 Apr 2017 A large multi-storey stone house at Ein Lifta on 23 April 2017, with an arched window on its upper floor, under a blue sky.
FIG. 03 · LIFTA. Two photographs of Ein Lifta from the visit of 23 April 2017: the village on its terraces seen across the valley, with newer buildings along the ridge above, and a large stone house with an arched window on its upper floor. Photographs: Parallax.
Case 03

What the Desert Holds Highway 111, Eastern Coachella Valley, California · 2026

ActiveEnvironmental racism

A spatial counter-archive of environmental racism across California's inland sacrifice zones. Case Study 1 reads a 1.5-mile corridor of State Highway 111 through Mecca, an unincorporated farmworker community of approximately 8,000 in the Eastern Coachella Valley, against the same highway thirty miles north through Palm Desert, drawing on Dorothea Lange photographs, the Ernest Lowe Dunn field series, an original survey of 103 catalogued images, CalEnviroScreen 4.0 data, and CARB pesticide monitoring.

The comparative argument: where the highway passes through an unincorporated zone without municipal government, stacked hazards accumulate with no institutional mechanism for redress. The visual record, read against quantitative environmental health indicators, makes visibility and its management the subject of the case.

Fig. 04 · Salton Sea · NDWI
2015 · Aug Sentinel-2 NDWI water index of the Salton Sea and Coachella Valley, 20 August 2015, the sea at near full extent.
2026 · Mar Sentinel-2 NDWI water index of the same region, 25 March 2026, the sea visibly receded with exposed playa along its margins.
FIG. 04 · RECESSION. The Salton Sea in water index, eleven years apart. The shoreline retreats and the exposed playa widens, a growing source of windblown dust across the valley its margins record. Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data, 2015 and 2026.
Case 04

Santa Barbara Channel Carpinteria to Rincon Point, Santa Barbara County · 2026

ActiveEcology

A counter-archival investigation of mass seabird mortality in the Santa Barbara Channel, opened after a die-off of cormorants, murres, and brown pelicans along the California coast, reported in Santa Barbara on 2 April 2026 and attributed by the California Department of Fish and Wildlife to starvation. The study shoreline runs from Carpinteria State Beach to Rincon Point. The investigation lays sea-surface temperature, weekly pier toxin monitoring, and documented mortality onto one timeline.

The argument concerns the threshold of detectability: monitoring infrastructure exists (C-HARM, HABMAP, BeachCOMBERS) and the pattern is documented and accelerating, yet each mortality event is treated as novel. The investigation's subject is the gap between existing data systems and any integrated rapid-response mechanism, not individual cause-of-death determinations. Through the die-off the toxin record stayed near zero, while the channel warmed to 3.8 °C above average in August 2026, the third-warmest month in a 2011 to 2026 record.

Fig. 05 · SST anomaly · Santa Barbara Channel
Ocean warming in the Santa Barbara Channel monthly sea-surface temperature anomaly vs the 1971–2000 average, and the seabird die-offs that track it -2 -1 0 +1 +2 +3 +4 ANOMALY (°C) +3.8 2011 2013 2015 2017 2019 2021 2023 2025 2027 THE BLOB · 2014–2016 California Current die-offs Cassin’s auklet ~400,000, common murre ~1,000,000 2026 DIE-OFF Santa Barbara, starvation 91 cormorants, 157 murres, 136 pelicans in care Aug 2026: +3.8 °C third-warmest month of 2011–2026 Temperature: NOAA OISST v2.1 daily anomaly (0.25°, baseline 1971–2000), Santa Barbara Channel mean, via NOAA CoastWatch and NCEI ERDDAP. Outlined bar: September 2026 is partial (1 to 16 September). Die-off estimates as cited (Jones et al. 2018, 2024; Piatt et al. 2020). 2026 intake SBWCN, January to mid-June (Santa Barbara News-Press, 15 June 2026); cause CDFW. Retrieved 2 October 2026.
FIG. 05 · A WARMING CHANNEL. Monthly sea-surface temperature anomaly for the Santa Barbara Channel, 2011 to 2026, against the 1971 to 2000 average (NOAA OISST v2.1, retrieved October 2026; September is partial). The two largest California Current die-offs struck at the peak of the 2014 to 2016 marine heatwave, the Blob, which reached 4.2 °C above average here in September 2015. The 2026 Santa Barbara die-off, which CDFW attributes to starvation, followed a winter that ran 1.6 to 2.0 °C above average, and the channel has since warmed further, to 3.8 °C above average in August 2026, the third-warmest month in this record. Temperature via NOAA CoastWatch and NCEI; die-off figures as cited (Jones et al. 2018, 2024; Piatt et al. 2020; SBWCN; CDFW 2026).
06 · Researchers Appointments are project-based and collaborative

Working with Parallax.

Appointments form around a specific investigation rather than a standing post. They suit researchers comfortable moving across media and archive types, and at home with the evidentiary and sovereignty commitments that structure the work.

We research collaboratively and publish under source-available, citable licences. Findings remain bound to their sources; the record is built to be contested and corrected.

To propose an appointment, write to hello@parallaxagency.org with a brief statement of interest and the project you have in mind.

Areas of work
  • Conflict archives and dispersed heritage
  • Ecology, land, and environmental change
  • Photography and lens-based evidence
  • Human rights documentation and testimony
  • Indigenous archives and data sovereignty
  • Post-colonial archives and political violence
07 · Engage The work is collaborative from the first conversation

Bring a case, or collaborate.

Propose an investigation

Bring a case

A contested site, a dispersed body of images, a disputed or trafficked object, an erased archive. We reconstruct and corroborate.

Collaborate

Partner on the work

For researchers, journalists, community partners, and the people who hold contested records, with the sovereignty of the material respected throughout.

Contact

Get in touch

Propose a collaboration, commission an investigation, or ask about the method and teaching.

hello@parallaxagency.org

At the scale of a single researcher, a journalist, a community, or a human-rights group. Write to Parallax