April 12, 2023
“To spare oneself from grief at all cost can be achieved only at the price of total detachment, which excludes the ability to experience happiness.”
– Erich Fromm
Japanese photographer Sayuri Ichida’s mother died almost 20 years ago, but only recently during the COVID pandemic, surrounded by sickness and dying, did it occur to her that she had never properly mourned her mother’s loss. So she embarked on a project to help her come to terms with her grief.
“It was surprising to see how photography reflects my emotions,” she told writer Diane Smyth. “These photographs really mirror my feelings; my other work doesn’t look like this.”
The project titled, “Absentee,” consists of photos she took during the lockdown. They are photos of nature, her body and industrial buildings, which she shot during solitary walks in New York and later London.
“It was an empty time, such a strange time,” Ichida told Smyth. “I think everyone experienced it in that way but also, because I found it so difficult to accept this reality, I retreated into my inner self. I went to a different space in my mind, my self was kind of absent. It’s something that has happened to me before, around the time I lost my mother. My memory is so bad from that period, I really don’t remember it clearly. It’s like I erased the difficult experience I had.”
The collection of 120 black-and-white photos were published in a limited edition collection.
Whether we’re artists or ordinary people, we need to find an expression for our grief. We can tell our stories in different ways. Some of us will journal, some of us will share personal memories, some of us will create a video, but all of us will weep and give expression to a loss that sometimes defies expression.
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Expressing our grief gives voice to painful emotions and leads us to a deeper understanding of the one we lost … and ourselves.