Project 03
If You Aren’t Here, Why Can I Feel You
Project
Photography, Research
2026
If you aren’t here why can I feel you is a photographic research project that utilises photography as a tool through which grief is not only processed, but spatialised and re-experienced.
Following the loss of my mother at age eleven, and later my grandmother at twenty-three, family archives and photographic images have become central to how I maintain connection, not only to those I have lost, but to my Italian-Australian identity. In this project, I investigate the ways in which photography does not simply document memory; rather, it produces a space in which grief can be revisited, reconstructed, and felt across time and geography. The Italian diaspora saw over 1.1 million Italians migrate to Australia following the Second World War, including my maternal grandparents. Italian-Australian culture exists as both a time capsule and a hybrid formation: an amalgamation of regional identities reshaped within a new cultural context. I identify strongly with this lineage, particularly as my paternal family does not reside in Australia. As a child, I would look at photographs of my mother, her sisters, and my grandparents with an intense sense of familiarity, an affective recognition that felt as though I were remembering a childhood that was not my own.
Following the loss of my mother at age eleven, and later my grandmother at twenty-three, family archives and photographic images have become central to how I maintain connection, not only to those I have lost, but to my Italian-Australian identity. In this project, I investigate the ways in which photography does not simply document memory; rather, it produces a space in which grief can be revisited, reconstructed, and felt across time and geography. The Italian diaspora saw over 1.1 million Italians migrate to Australia following the Second World War, including my maternal grandparents. Italian-Australian culture exists as both a time capsule and a hybrid formation: an amalgamation of regional identities reshaped within a new cultural context. I identify strongly with this lineage, particularly as my paternal family does not reside in Australia. As a child, I would look at photographs of my mother, her sisters, and my grandparents with an intense sense of familiarity, an affective recognition that felt as though I were remembering a childhood that was not my own.
This sensation intensified when I visited my grandmother’s village, Linguaglossa, in Sicily. Despite arriving there for the first time in my mid-twenties, the place felt deeply known to me. The photographs in this book bring together images of my mother and her family during her visit to Sicily at age three, alongside my own photographs taken during a recent trip this year in May. Through this juxtaposition, the project explores how images collapse temporal distance, allowing past and present to coexist. What emerged through this experience was the realisation that the familiarity I felt was not simply cultural belonging, but an expression of grief; displaced, inherited, and reactivated through place.
As Alavez (2021) suggests, locations hold bereavement across overlapping dimensions: material, embodied psychological, and virtual. This project engages particularly with the less tangible dimensions of grief, considering how places carry traces of memory, emotion, and imagined futures. Photography becomes the mechanism through which these dimensions are accessed, enabling a continued relationship with those who are no longer present. Belén Jiménez-Alonso and Ignacio Brescó de Luna (2021) identify five key functions of photography in relation to grief: it enables agency in the search for meaning; scaffolds narratives of loss; preserves continuing bonds with the deceased; operates as a technology of the self for emotional regulation; and facilitates the review of contextualised experience. This framework underpins my practice, offering insight into both my attachment to family archives and my instinctive turn toward image-making in moments of emotional intensity.
Using a Canon Sure Shot, a hand-me-down, 35mm point and shoot, I began to photograph whenever I encountered this nostalgic, childlike, and often disorienting feeling of grief. At times, this process felt performative: a way of externalising sensation rather than fully inhabiting it. I photographed quiet, everyday moments, sharing meals, time in the garden where my grandparents once worked as market gardeners, visits to the local church and school, my grandmother’s home, a fountain my mother visited as a child. These appear to be a common theme in my experience of grief, these often overlooked everyday actions. These sites became charged with questions: What did they do here? What were they doing when they were here? If you aren’t here, why can I feel you?
The question that titles this project is not rhetorical. It reflects the central tension of the work: that through photography, absence is not empty, but inhabited. Images do not resolve grief, they sustain it positively, giving it form, location, and continuity.
"Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends." Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking.
References:
[1] Alavez, J. (2022). Mapping Intimate Geographies of Grief and Loss. Cartographica: The International Journal for Geographic Information and Geovisualization, 57(4), pp.270–280. doi:10.3138/cart-2021-0024.
[2] Didion, J. (2012). The Year of Magical Thinking. London Fourth Estate.
[3] Jiménez-Alonso, B. and Brescó de Luna, I. (2021). Grief, photography and meaning making: A psychological constructivist approach. Culture & Psychology, [online] 28(1), pp.107–132.doi:10.1177/1354067x211015416.
[1] Selected Archival Images
1960-1970, Austalia (Sydney) and Italy (Linguaglossa, Unknown).
[2] Selected New Material from Linguglossa, 2026
2026. Linguaglossa, Italy