The Shape of an Absence

I have always been drawn to the strange feeling of missing something I cannot remember. There are absences that precede us, silences that outlive those who carried them, and memories of lives we never had the chance to know.

The Shape of an Absence

I have always been drawn to the strange feeling of missing something I cannot remember.

There are absences that precede us. Stories that reach us in fragments, silences that are passed from one generation to another, questions that remain long after those who might have answered them are gone. Sometimes I wonder whether we inherit memories, or only the space left by what was never told.

For years, I have been trying to understand how something can remain so deeply present without ever having been fully known. How a life can continue to shape another life through its absence. Along the way, other losses have quietly changed the meaning of what I was searching for. What began as a question about the past became a way of looking at the world.

The Shape of an Absence grew from this place, somewhere between remembrance and imagination. Photography became a way of approaching what could not be reconstructed, of remaining close to things without needing to resolve their mystery.

I am interested in the fragile distance between what we see and what we believe we recognize. In the moments when the familiar seems to belong to another time, and something almost forgotten appears to return. An image may hold a presence, but it cannot tell us everything about what has passed before it, or what will follow.

I have never thought of death as entirely separate from life. There is tenderness in the knowledge that everything living is passing, and a strange beauty in the traces left behind. But disappearance is not always peaceful, nor does every absence arrive with an explanation. Some things are taken before we have learned how to say goodbye.

Memory is not a place where the past remains untouched, but one where it continues to change. There is a certain freedom in accepting that not every question will find its answer.

And still, something remains in the silence of what was never known.