Diane Victor’s ghostly portraits of a missing child and an incarcerated man are part of a series of smoke drawings that call attention to the vulnerability of lives lost or removed from society. Having developed an astonishing technique, Victor mounted her paper overhead and laboriously moved the flame of a candle beneath the paper’s surface to create portraits with the smoke’s carbon deposits. Although she was able to reinforce the marks and then dust away excess residue using a dry brush, she did not permanently fix the fragile image to the paper. Doing so would have caused a reaction within the carbon and caused the image to disappear. The transient quality of materials used and their result—a work easily subject to erasure—subtly question society’s feckless tendency to overlook people whose histories are deemed too troubling, who too easily disappear from our vaporous memories. By securing their blurred images in the forefront of our minds, Victor resurrects their existence. The faces in these drawings float, or fall, within the paper’s vastness. Smoke trails to the edges with no body or background to serve as context.