Emotional Spectrum in Pictures: Framing "Saudade"

Photography isn't just about the visuals, technicalities or equipment. To be a photographer, you have to capture the unseen and the abstract. And when you do, you grow one step empathetic. Here we review Lomographs that straight out speak of human emotions. This week, we'll be having "saudade".

The Portuguese word "saudade" is an untranslatable expression, but many attribute it as a feeling of longing for something, or someone that once existed, loved, and lost. It's the strong presence of absence, when one thing or person you surely knew was there, was now gone.

It's an intense "I miss you" but louder; "I love you" but in crippling, constant pain. It's the feeling of love and loss, dancing within you as you look at things and places where you try to find someone's face in all others, but you know it'll never be the same shade of hair or it's never the right blue hue in her eyes. It will never be.

It's the feeling of looking at old items that used to belong to a lost lover. It's when one looks into an old familiar place, yet you are estranged as things no longer looked the way they used to. It's an old grand piano, beautiful yet broken, and it won't produce the same keys anymore. It's the feeling of a woman and a child looking across the sea, waiting or mourning over the father sent to battle. This has been a state of mind among the Portuguese, a way of living through a constant feeling and awareness of absence, the knowing that something's missing, the wistful longing for completeness, but knowing you will never feel whole.

As the Portuguese would say, it's the strong desire to matar as saudades (lit. 'to kill the saudades').

2017-10-20 #culture #photography #saudade #emotional-spectrum-in-pictures