Portraits of Nostalgia

Exploration of aesthetics of nostalgia. Painting the boundaries between a memory and a lapse of pain caused by yearning for spaces in our mind or places in the world that we have never experienced in the way we think.

Nostalgia is not the wish for the good old days. Underneath that typical story about nostalgia, is pain. A longing for something that perhaps never really was, an unfulfilled wish, that we didn’t know we had — not a regret nor a disappointment, more an unthought that belonged in the past and keeps on resurfacing like a call to pay attention to it re-emerging in the now.

Nostalgia starts as a personal experience, but is universal, and can be shared regardless of the particular grievances and dissatisfactions that it brings up for an individual. It belongs on the timeline of our own individual narratives — it lies between a boundary of our own personal stories and phantasies of the past. It’s a dangerous sentiment that can be politicised and leveraged to split the unresolved past pain towards the Other in the current moment.

I like these photos because of the mood conveyed by the colours, shapes and forms, rather than their content, place, and time. They are at the boundary between my experiences of the past, and my dreams of what actually happened, yet they don’t reveal too much of the bodies, relationships, actions, and as such offer a canvas for the viewer to paint on.