Grief (it’s a big one!)

Thank you for tuning into my very first blog post!

I’ve decided that each post will revolve around a theme - something that’s been sitting with me, nudging me, or occasionally whacking me over the head during the past month. (Ambitious goal: monthly posts… we’ll see how that goes 😄)

This month’s theme is… grief.

I know—not exactly the light and fluffy opener we might have hoped for. But here we are.

So where does photography fit into this for me? If at all?

Well… photography has always been a calming, grounding space for me. It’s how I create art, and art, for me, is simply a visual expression of a feeling. As a child, I wasn’t a fan of feelings at all - I would’ve happily returned most of them for a refund. But over time, I’ve come to realise I feel things quite deeply, and I’ve developed a real curiosity about how emotions work—what they do, why they exist, and how we move through them.

That is… until I met grief.

Oof. She’s a big one.

Grief doesn’t politely knock and wait to be invited in. It just arrives—like happiness, anger, or frustration - but heavier, louder, and a lot less subtle. And once it’s there, you can’t really negotiate with it.

The stage I’m in right now is the actual grieving - the part where you go from having someone (or something) woven into your everyday life… to suddenly not. The routines, the companionship, the small shared moments—all gone. Just like that. It’s confronting in a way that’s hard to put into words.

Photography, for me, has three parts.
It’s the act of being present and ‘seeing’ something.
Capturing it, reviewing the image and noticing what it gives back.
And then it’s going again—adjusting, refining, chasing that image that gives you the feeling you were wanting.

The image I’m sharing here is my interpretation of grief.

I feel incredibly grateful that I’ve made it into my forties before experiencing this depth of grief. I’ve known loss before—friendships, relationships, even a sense of identity after 22 years in a workplace—but this… this one stopped me in my tracks, and hit me twice in 2 weeks.

What I’m starting to understand is this: grief only exists where love existed first.

You don’t grieve what you didn’t care about.

So if we were to simplify it (for the math lovers out there):
big love = big grief.
Simple. Not easy—but simple.

I don’t want this first post to feel too heavy, but I do want to share this side of photography with you—the side where it becomes a way to process, to feel, and to express what words sometimes can’t.

This image, for me, is grief.
Alone.
Empty.
Nothing—and yet somehow… everything, all at once.

_________

It’s a vast, echoing space
where you used to be.

I move -
but I don’t arrive.

I pause -
but I don’t settle.

Somewhere between
holding on
and letting go…

I am here,
without you.

_________

Take care everyone - and do one thing today that makes you happy!