Rosa Dury

Saudade is an exploration into nostalgia for your childhood self. After nearly twenty years in the school system, graduation feels like a final departure from childhood and the safety net of being a student. Saudade is my exploration of that shift into adulthood, to feel the quiet heartbreak of leaving the past and the excitement of the future. This project considers the importance of remembering who we were, learning to accept change with fondness, and embracing personal growth.

Each image features a box I constructed based on interviews with the subjects about their childhood bedrooms. My interpretation of the rooms is somewhat surreal, emphasising them as a memory and the distortion of recalling a place through a child’s perspective. The bedrooms are presented in miniature and paired with the subject’s head, creating a visual metaphor for outgrowing a chapter of life, becoming, quite literally, too big for your childhood self.

All images were taken on a 5×4 large format camera; it was important that this project remained analogue, a physical representation of place and memory. The camera itself serves as a room where these memories are physically preserved.

The word Saudade is a Portuguese term I stumbled across in my research. It does not have a direct translation, but can be understood as an emotional state of deep melancholic or nostalgic longing for a person or thing that is absent. I felt this to be a fitting title.

With eternal thanks to Maggie, Lois, Noah, Dave and Mo.

The Surveyor/Surveyeds starting point was a meme I saw on Tumblr years ago. It was of two identical head silhouettes, one labelled man and the other woman. The man’s mind showed an apple alone, and the woman’s, an image of her eating an apple. I looked to myself to see whether I found this image to be true; the more I assessed my daily life, the more I caught myself performing for an imaginary crowd. Even when alone, I was creating a version of me to be viewed, creating a “second self that felt more polished, more considered, and over time, detached.

Influenced by John Berger’s Ways of Seeing, I focused on his essay on women.

“And so she comes to consider the surveyor and the surveyed within her as two constituent yet always distinct elements of her identity as a woman”

 

These photographs are an attempt to merge back into this constructed image, to recognise her as an extension of the self, equally as me as l am her. Questioning where the boundary lies between authenticity and performance, and whether that boundary ever truly existed at all. I hope my photographs are a reminder that you can move between versions of who you are, that while we adapt and reshape ourselves for this world, every version, performed or otherwise, still belongs to us.