Photography is capable of capturing emotions and feelings which can then be understood by other people when looking at images. Photographs allow photographers to capture moments which an outsider would not be able to witness, which is a key theme of my own personal study.  Feelings and emotions are subjective as each of us may feel differently when we view an image but usually there is a general message or meaning behind most photographs which can be universally read and interpreted in a similar way. The key themes running through my personal study are centred on three words, which have been introduced already: absence, fate and change.

The word absence can be defined as the state of being away from a place or person, an occasion or period of being away from a place or person or the non-existence or lack of something. Absence in my own work relates to the absence of people within my granddad’s life  and the absence of a good quality life. This could be taken literally such as the absence of his eye/eye sight or the absence of friends and family he has lost. But also more metaphorical absence such as the loss of hope and lack of motivation my granddad feels or how lost he feels as a person as he recognises change. Within both Phillip Toledano’s and Laia Abril’s work, use an element of absence in their photographs and investigations. When looking at the inspirations into why Toledano decided to produce the project ‘Days with my father’ I found it was due to absence or loss of his mother, who suddenly died in 2006. After she died, he realised how much she had been shielding him from his father’s mental state. As an attempt to re-connection and develop a new relationship with his father, he made this project which shows the saddening effects of Phillip’s mother’s absence on the family, especially focusing on his father. While making  the project the Toledano learnt about the illness his father faced and also what his mother had dealt with previously before her death. He realised the significance of his illness when the death of his wife was a shock to him, asking ‘Why did no one tell me?’ and ‘Why didn’t you take me to her funeral?’ After a while, he couldn’t keep reminding him about her death as he described ‘ it was killing both of us to constantly re-live her death.’ His father had short-term memory loss, so there was an absence of his memory which Toledano and his father found difficult to cope with as he was forgetting vital memories of his own life. Toledano often found notes, which his father would write to remind himself of things he could remember. He also found notes from his father explaining how he felt lost and scared, which was a coping strategy his father adopted to manage this absence. In the image we can see a A4 notebook, as well as a blue pen which is slightly diagonal. The notebook has writing on it, which I assume is his fathers as it reads “Where is Helene? Phillip? Ralph? Everybody?” The book is placed on what looks like a bedside table, which also has a photo frame containing a photograph and a lamp which projects light onto the page to reveal the text, which means the light in the photograph is artificial lighting. This image shows his father’s confusion and frustration caused my his memory loss, which gives the viewers an insight to his father’s thought processes and creates evidence of this. Personally, I really like this image as I like how we are made aware of his feelings and thoughts. This can be seen as a documentary image, which is the style of most of the images within his project. Coping strategies and showing the effects of absence is a key theme throughout my project.

Similarly, Laia Abril also tackles absence in her work, particularly in her project ‘The Epilogue.’ Again she is looking at the effects of absence on a family, who lost their daughter to Bulimia. She does this in a form of an interview or discussion with family members and close friends as they discuss Tammy and her illness, an example of this is a close friend writes “I spent so many years trying to make her better, trying to fix her.” This is her reflecting on her life with Cammy and explaining how she tried to help Cammy, however it’s too late as well as admitting coping mechanisms to help them grieve. Her father says ” I still cannot bear to listen to music: we all mourn in different ways.” Furthermore, Abril also explores memories of her presence as we all invent and reinvent our memories of the past every day of our lives as Sigmund Freud told us that “the answer to our confusion were locked in the secret drawers of our past, Photography, then,provides us with the documents.” I feel this is a strong quote relating to this as if our past is documented it can not be changed or manipulated, which means archival photographs will give an insight to Cammy’s life before she developed her illness to help draw conclusions on why or how this may of occurred. Abril does this by including archival imagery as well as taking photographs of objects, which would have belonged to Cammy such as the weighing scale, which would have been a significant part of her life as she tackled Bulimia. These archival images also act as snapshots of memories of Cammy’s life or childhood. There are also sections of text describing events, which had taken place in her life at previous periods of Cammy’s life. An example of this would be a short paragraph, which explained “As teens, I knew my atomic bomb to drop on her when she was getting after me was to call her fat, but she would never admit it hurt her.” This could have been the trigger to Bulimia, which could be seen as an absence of self-esteem and confidence within her own body, leading to her illness, which resulted in her death. This image is an archival photograph, which has been taken previously in her childhood of Cammy in a swimsuit sat next to a swimming pool, smiling. In the book the image is presented as a full bleed image, which really emphasises the image. The image itself looks like it has been taken in natural sun lighting as you can see where the sun is at its strongest as it lightens up parts of the image. This image shows Cammy as she was before her illness, which enables the viewers to make a comparison. In my own study I had also looked at the cause or trigger for the strokes as well as looking at memories.