All the colours within this pitch-black darkness

After my 18-year-old brother’s sudden death in 2024, I began photographing my family and his classmates to explore how absence becomes part of daily life—and how grief reshapes memory, identity, and the ways we continue to carry those we lost.

A speck of dust for the universe
Turns into a lumineer
When one gets thrown in the air
And creates a heavenly storm

In contemporary society we rarely face the reality of death or the finite nature of life as openly as our ancestors once did. We live with a quiet assumption that there will always be time, that growing old is a given, and that death is far away. Grief, once a shared and visible experience, has become something we avoid—a taboo.

This project is deeply personal. In the spring of 2024, I lost my 18-year-old brother in an accident. For my mother, this marked the devastating loss of the youngest of her four children. Such a tragedy is impossible to prepare for; it leaves us grappling with countless questions beyond just "why." The pain, almost unbearable, shakes the foundation of our beliefs, our faith in life, and our sense of normalcy. The grieving process is long, perhaps lifelong, and life itself becomes something entirely new to navigate.

Since then, I have been photographing both my family and my brother’s classmates during their senior year of high school. This was meant to be a time of milestones—prom, graduation, choosing a career path, stepping into adulthood. We were supposed to share these experiences together, but instead I witnessed and documented them through his absence. His peers, determined to honor his memory, created new ways to keep him present as they fulfilled the dreams he once held, and they are committed to ensuring he remains present in spirit as they move forward with their own lives.

The photographs I present here capture these traces of grief and resilience: how absence becomes part of everyday life, how memory survives in gestures, objects, and rituals. They reflect not only the sorrow but also the strength that emerges in the wake of loss.

This series forms the first chapter of a larger body of work I am committed to pursuing in the years ahead. What started as an intimate attempt to understand my own grief has become the foundation for a long-term exploration, in which I also plan to meet others carrying similar losses. I want to examine how grief leaves its marks not only in memory, but in the body, in identity, and in the quiet rituals of everyday life. This work is not about death itself, but about the transformations that follow it—the ways the presence of those we have lost continues to shape who we are.