Faith Hope & Fiction

Exploring Grief through Photography

By Liz Jakimow

The phone call turned my life upside down. It was August 2024, and the call came from my boyfriend’s number, but it wasn’t my boyfriend on the phone. It was his son, telling me that Greg had died of a heart attack.

I had felt grief before (for my grandmother, my father and my children’s grandfather), but this felt like an entirely new type of grief. Constantly in tears, I found it difficult to do or think about anything except think about Greg.

To help me in the grieving process, I decided to take just one photo a day. It didn’t matter what it was. It didn’t even have to look good. It just had to be a photo.

In setting myself this task, I gave me something to do that seemed achievable. It enabled me to focus on something else for a brief period every day. It also motivated me to spend time looking at nature and benefit from the healing it offered.

When I first started taking these photos, there was no thought behind them. One of my first photos during this time of mourning was a dry patch of grass. But as I continued, I discovered that my way of looking at the world had changed. I was attracted to shadows and cycles of life and death within nature. Each of my photos spoke about my grief in some way. Some were reminders that death is a part of life. Others offered a sign of hope, that even amid the gloom, buds will still appear in spring; there is always light in the darkest forest.

The first photo I took where I realised I was trying, in my own way, to “photograph grief” was a shot I took by Lake Burley Griffin in Canberra, Australia, not far from where I work. Two swans were on the lake, and I had my camera out and was photographing them. As I saw the way that they ducked in and out of the water, I wanted to capture the moment where one swan was one top of the water and one was below. This to me symbolised my boyfriend still being next to me, even if he was on a different plane and could no longer be seen.

It was then that I had the idea of curating these photos and creating an exhibition. The exhibition titled “A journey with grief: exploring loss through photography and poetry” included photos and poetry from my initial three-month grieving period. I also self-published a book, containing more of my photos and poems also from that period.

About two months after Greg’s death, I visited Floriade, a flower festival held in Canberra, for a friend’s birthday. While others were snapping pictures of the perfect floral displays, I was taking photos of the flowers that were dead or damaged. One photo from this day is titled “Heart Wide Open”: a flower with half its petals down, showing the stamen inside. This photo spoke to me about my boyfriend’s heart attack and how my own heart seemed to have been ripped wide open. But it also spoke to me about the fragility of life; flowers, like people, die, but that is all part of the cyclical nature of life.

Sometimes the poems and the photos went together. One photo from the exhibition, “The Empty Chair,” was taken by Araluen Creek, which is about a five-minute walk from my house. When I saw the chair that had been left by the riverbank, it seemed so poignant and sad. After taking that photo, I converted it to black and white and edited it to increase the shadows and darkness, giving it a very moody feel.

The photo inspired me to write the poem “Empty Chairs” to capture the way I felt when looking at chairs that my boyfriend used to sit in. Although they were empty, they were still filled with his presence.

The chair is empty
And yet filled with your presence
More than when you were alive.

For every time I see it
I think of you sitting there,
The way you smiled,
The words you spoke,
You leaning towards me,
Your hand resting on my arm,
The joy upon your face
That I knew was because of me.

It was only a moment,
And yet it lives forever,
Permanently sitting there,
In the chair that is now empty.
– Liz Jakimow

Driving down to the coast one day, I noticed how quickly we passed by the trees on the side of the road. It reminded me of how brief a period I was with my boyfriend. I wanted to capture this sense of time moving too quickly. Sitting in the passenger seat, I put my camera on a slow shutter speed, to blur the photo and symbolize fleeting time.

While many of my photos speak to life and death, there are always signs of hope. Greg’s death in August was soon followed by the Australian Spring in September. Even though I was still grieving, everywhere I looked I was enveloped in signs of new life. At first, seeing them depressed me and made me almost angry. How could there be new life when Greg was dead? Yet after a while, I saw them as signs of hope.

Even though nature dies, it is reborn in a new season. The cycle of life and death continues in nature, and for humans too.

Liz Jakimow is an Australian photographer who specialises in nature photography. Please visit her online portfolio at: https://lizjakimow.myportfolio.com/

The photos that accompany this essay are the work of Liz Jakimow who has graciously given her permission for them to be used by FaithHopeandFiction.com

Copyright Liz Jakimow