Photographing absence. This is a meditation on loss and the life imbued in everyday objects, the belongings of the dead.
Feeling inarticulate with the death of my beloved wife Catherine who drowned in a plane crash I started to photograph her things. They are just things, right? They are just things but they become something else when the person is dead; fetish objects; imbued with the divine. When I photograph them I can feel her, both present and absent. They are in fact part of her, or rather, she part of them. Her DNA is there, tiny particles of Catherine in those clothes. Is it transubstantiation (Catherine would get a kick out of that), has she become these things, all I have left except for fallible memory?
At once lonely and glorifying, empty and full. With them, I try to reach out to her, through the water through time in messages through the only means I know, art.
Perhaps these pieces let you connect to a loss you feel, but may also be unable to articulate.
SD Holman
2011