Grief, A Letter
Giffith Park
In my craft, I wield the camera as one might a pen in a fevered attempt to document life—both to preserve and somehow to prove it. Each frame, a thousandth of a second trapped in amber, is a confession of loss even as it captures a presence. I once photographed a lover’s smile, unaware that it would later serve as a relic of love evaporated, a punctum that stings with every viewing.
I am haunted by Barthes’ revelation, that every photograph heralds death. In the sterile clarity of the lens, I seek the studium that resonates with shared narratives and collective emotions. Yet, invariably, it is the punctum that disarms me—a crease worn into fabric, the particular slant of light across a cheekbone. These details pierce with private significance, breaking through the surface to touch the raw nerve of personal grief.
Each viewing is a confrontation with mortality—her absence reverberates in the quiet corners of emptied rooms. In photographs, she is both perpetually alive and perpetually gone, her image a paradox I carry.
And then, there is the abyss left by a lover who departed not through death but through a severing of vows. The photographs I have of her are full of false promises; they show a future that will never age into reality. The grief here is different—it does not speak the final language of death but murmurs of unresolved narratives and roads abruptly abandoned. Each image is a moment paused at the precipice of becoming, a reminder of what was lost in the chasm of what could not be.
This grief, too, finds its punctum—unexpected, sharp. A note left in a familiar handwriting, a glimpse of a shared haunt, the particular way the night folds around the shoulders in the early hours of absence. It is these details, these small betrayals of normalcy, that puncture anew. Photographs, then, are not merely records; they are triggers, each a potential landmine of latent sorrow.
In compiling these images, I am both archivist and archaeologist, sifting through the layers of my own history, uncovering artifacts of joy and shards of despair. Each photograph I take now is tinted with this knowledge—that it will outlast its moment, that it will one day be all that remains of a story, a life, a love. With this, I imbue each frame with a silent prayer, that it might be gentle with its future viewer, that it might serve as a bridge over the rivers of grief that we all must navigate.
Photography, then, becomes a means of grappling with the immutable truth of impermanence. Through my lens, I both confront and evade the realities of absence, crafting an elegy for the everyday. In this way, I strive to hold on to what I know I will lose, to render the ephemeral eternal, even as I acknowledge that each photograph is but a whisper from the void.
Esther Son
Middle May 2024
I am haunted by Barthes’ revelation, that every photograph heralds death. In the sterile clarity of the lens, I seek the studium that resonates with shared narratives and collective emotions. Yet, invariably, it is the punctum that disarms me—a crease worn into fabric, the particular slant of light across a cheekbone. These details pierce with private significance, breaking through the surface to touch the raw nerve of personal grief.
Each viewing is a confrontation with mortality—her absence reverberates in the quiet corners of emptied rooms. In photographs, she is both perpetually alive and perpetually gone, her image a paradox I carry.
And then, there is the abyss left by a lover who departed not through death but through a severing of vows. The photographs I have of her are full of false promises; they show a future that will never age into reality. The grief here is different—it does not speak the final language of death but murmurs of unresolved narratives and roads abruptly abandoned. Each image is a moment paused at the precipice of becoming, a reminder of what was lost in the chasm of what could not be.
This grief, too, finds its punctum—unexpected, sharp. A note left in a familiar handwriting, a glimpse of a shared haunt, the particular way the night folds around the shoulders in the early hours of absence. It is these details, these small betrayals of normalcy, that puncture anew. Photographs, then, are not merely records; they are triggers, each a potential landmine of latent sorrow.
In compiling these images, I am both archivist and archaeologist, sifting through the layers of my own history, uncovering artifacts of joy and shards of despair. Each photograph I take now is tinted with this knowledge—that it will outlast its moment, that it will one day be all that remains of a story, a life, a love. With this, I imbue each frame with a silent prayer, that it might be gentle with its future viewer, that it might serve as a bridge over the rivers of grief that we all must navigate.
Photography, then, becomes a means of grappling with the immutable truth of impermanence. Through my lens, I both confront and evade the realities of absence, crafting an elegy for the everyday. In this way, I strive to hold on to what I know I will lose, to render the ephemeral eternal, even as I acknowledge that each photograph is but a whisper from the void.
Esther Son
Middle May 2024