"This innovative project explores the burdens, hopes, and dreams of Portland’s homeless population through cherished items they carry throughout their lives, fostering compassion and understanding in a world often divided. Through compelling storytelling and creative expression, award-winning photographer Jim Lommasson amplifies voices from Portland’s homeless community, addressing themes of mental health, addiction, housing, personal growth, family dynamics and  illuminates the resilience and humanity behind each object – and the person carrying it. This project resonates deeply for me, spreading a message of shared humanity and the healing power of empathy.”

– John Lewis


A Tribute to Humanity
I had the chance to preview Jim Lommasson’s powerful new exhibition, What I Carry, and I’m still carrying it with me. Lommasson, a master of visual storytelling, has spent years refining a style that gives voice to those too often unheard. His past works have traveled across the U.S., shedding light on the refugee experience and the stories of war survivors. But What I Carry marks a bold, deeply moving evolution in his work.
This latest project turns its lens inward—to our own communities—and focuses on the houseless population living among us. Through intimate photographs and handwritten stories, Lommasson asks not just what people carry physically, but emotionally, spiritually, and historically. It’s a search for meaning, memory, and humanity—one that could not be more timely, or more relevant.
What makes this exhibition stand apart is not only its artistic integrity, but its deep compassion. It doesn’t speak about people—it lets them speak for themselves.
Come ready to reflect, to feel, and to see our community in a new light.

– Sankar Raman, The Immigrant Story

A way forward from the homeless crisis

"In our conversation, we both agreed how working with this population immediately called out our very own stereotypes about the unhoused. The degree of learnedness and sophistication displayed in interaction around text and literature was a surprise. Just goes to show how deeply ingrained our prejudices are, our assumptions about what is or isn’t likely to be associated with precarious existence.

What Lommasson’s project does, however, is independent of the educational status of his collaborators. It unveils the humanity contained in all people, housed or unhoused, depressed and anxious or not, addicted in some fashion or another (easier to hide with a roof over your head, I might add) or not, sharing a place where we feel we belong – or are told that we don’t.

It is profound work that has the potential of opening someone’s eye to underlying similarities rather than differences, of closing the gap between “us” and “them,” of diminishing stereotypes that continue to harm the pursuit of solutions addressing homelessness."

– Frederilke Heuer, Oregon ArtsWatch