I first encountered the work of Sissel Thastum during a Guest Lecture given via Canvas at the Falmouth University. Her series of images under the title of ‘I Am Here When You Are Here’ seem filled with a sense of ‘Hireath’, a great longing for a time, place or person that may never have existed in reality.
Although many of the images are of a deeply intimate and personal nature one gains a real ‘feeling’ for the location in which the images have been made. The author herself refers to the images as being of a ‘Nostolgic’ itself linked to Gerentology (from the Greek Notos – to return home home) with its reference to aging and a possible state of second childhood with the images generating a deep sense of longing and the desire to return home and spend sometime if the presence of someone close.
The feeling of hiraeth to which I refer is probably due, at least for myself, in part to the way in which the images have been made – using a film camera, printing and then scanning the images with little use of photoshop – the visibility of the film grain and the slightly hazy perhaps misty images create a sense of somewhere else, of moments lost in time, perhaps a better time(?). This is just the type of effect that I am interested in creating within the images I am creating for my own ‘Hiraeth’ project.
This has , for me, probably been the best lecture I have encountered within this unit and certainly one of the most helpful.
I Am Here When You Are Here – Sissel Thastum
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Hiraeth Photographic 