On Not Looking: Notes on Absence follows the first film, On Looking, Again: Notes On An Image, by turning away from Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother and focusing instead on what the photograph leaves outside the frame. Using a collage of archival stills and footage, it traces the forces surrounding the image (environmental collapse, labour displacement, and financial decisions made elsewhere) and considers the limits of what images can reveal. Where the first film is focused on looking, this one asks what responsibility remains when looking is no longer sufficient.

On Looking, Again: Notes On An Image is a short essay film that considers Dorothea Lange’s photograph Migrant Mother(1936). The film examines what the photograph shows and how it asks to be seen, moving from an early trust in the image, through an awareness of how it was made and used, to a more uncertain place where neither belief nor critique quite holds. The film ends by asking what it means to keep looking, rather than what the image means.