In late 2023, artist Vernon Ah Kee contacted Iranian-born Melbourne-based photographer Hoda Afshar and writer and human rights defender Behrouz Boochani with an invitation to work on a project to address the mass incarceration of Indigenous youth in Far North Queensland.
Ah Kee, who was born in Cairns, and belongs to Kuku Yalandji, Waanji, Yidinji and Gugu Yimithirr peoples, stressed the issues his community faced were "too big, too hard to deal with" alone.
Although Indigenous children aged 10 to 17 make up only 6 per cent of the population, they are 20 times more likely to be imprisoned.
Ah Kee said he wanted to build "forms of solidarity and communities that could help us fight these systems", Afshar recalls.
A year later, with the support of Change The Record, an organisation that works to reduce incarceration rates of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and Youth Empowered Towards Independence (YETI), which works with Indigenous youth caught up in the criminal justice system, Afshar had established a temporary portrait studio in YETI's backyard in Cairns.
"Nine days I stayed in the area, returning every day, to set up the big, large-format camera in that backyard," she says.
Over time her subjects, who rely on YETI for a range of support services, were drawn to Afshar, her camera and the props…
