Sweet Nothing

‘Sweet Nothing' is a photo essay exploring vulnerability. It contemplates the truths that emerge out of true stillness in oneself. The liberating ones, and the suffocating ones. It’s a paradox balancing simultaneous bliss and melancholia.

This series was inspired by the period of self-isolation that led me to revisit places in my hometown that I’d revelled in during childhood. Places I hadn’t really indulged in an afternoon ‘playing’ in for nearly a decade. The unexpected wave of nostalgia led to a realization that a very different person had come back. Everything had changed, but also nothing had changed. The optimistic girl who wanted to go beyond the ordinary, beyond the quiet suburb she grew up in had wound back in the same spot nearly a decade later, with the same longing and blind optimism to reach for more.

I wanted to capture the melancholy of what it meant to be back in the same state of being stuck and lost, while simultaneously savouring the rediscovery of the childhood wonder that made this stillness so exhilarating in the first place. In a future that seems both bleak and beckoning, these photos reminisce on the place of utter ‘nothingness’, where the bliss and optimism of childhood still exist, even if it’s a ghost or a veil to those who come back a little more broken.

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Submitted by Chara Ho.