What Grief and Loss Look Like, in Photos
All photos courtesy of Clare Hewitt

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What Grief and Loss Look Like, in Photos

What does it mean to lose something, or someone, dear to you? Photographer Clare Hewitt was mourning the death of her grandmother when she met a stroke victim who had lost part of her sight.

"I approached various different charities for those who had visual impairment or blindness and the Haringey Phoenix Group were the only ones that actually got back to me. Originally, I thought it would be a documentary project about the centre itself, about the charity itself. But when I got there I formed a really close friendship with Eugenie." Taylor Wessing Portrait Prize-nominee Clare Hewitt is talking about her eponymous Eugenie series, a medium format, double-stranded meditation on loss shot through film.

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Hewitt was grieving the death of her grandmother, a caring and nurturing co-parent, while Eugenie had suffered a stroke in her forties, resulting in severely reduced mobility and eyesight. "I guess we both formed a part of some kind of therapy for each other, in some ways, I suppose," Hewitt says. "[Eugenie] built herself back up from nothing. I really admired that in her. A very strong woman, very funny, very caring, just a nice person to be around, basically."

Hewitt started visiting her at her North London flat once a week, bringing a camera after a few months. She did this for three and a half years. The resultant series is dreamlike yet substantial—deeply rooted in the red brick buildings and caffs of Haringey, but with Eugenie's face often out of focus or shrouded in darkness. Light breaks in at unexpected angles, stirring up dust motes, revealing a citified greyness that manages not to be dreary. It is deliberately discombobulating and intimate.

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The tie between artist and sitter wasn't visual, but instead riven with the emotionality that is a hallmark of Hewitt's best work. "That's what I've figured out over the last few years, making that work. The emotional tie. That's what I get the most fulfilment out of—developing those emotional connections and then working from there." The unseeable bond between Hewitt and Eugenie became an anchor for the work.

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All photos courtesy of Clare Hewitt

"I think when I look back at the pictures I really connect with the way I was feeling at that time. Everything was a bit of a blur, a bit confused. I didn't really know where I was. I was just really disorientated, in the same way that she was physically. They definitely, I think, convey that sense of disorientation, things being not quite clear. Maybe you can associate it with memory somehow, I guess," Hewitt remarks.

"For example," Hewitt adds, "I took a lot of pictures of her teeth in a glass. I couldn't figure out why I was taking those pictures for a long time. I'd been having therapy for the last three years, and I was in a therapy session one day talking about my grandmother being in hospital—the nurses had lost her teeth. I think this obsession with things like that, with [Eugenie's] teeth, brought back memories I maybe wasn't conscious of that were played out in the pictures."

Grief is a universal touchstone in art and life, but Clare Hewitt's Eugenie is about profoundly tangible losses that can never be regained. The non-linearity of the series—the lack of narrative—enforces this permanence. While the project was completed over a number of years, there is no beginning, middle or end. The just is. The 'is' is the palpable unknowability of a new normality. It's not the process of grieving and stumbling through a tunnel towards an ill-defined light; it is seismic and life changing, hanging low and weighty in the air. Something will always be missing.

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"The fact that it never goes away and you still get sad, but you just learn to deal with life in a different way—it's a complete change in direction. You know, I'd see my grandmother every day for 23 years and it was just a process of trying to get used to her not being around. It's a completely different experience than the one that Eugenie was having with losing her sight, but ultimately she changed track too. She had gone in a completely different direction. I was watching her do that while experiencing it in my own way. It didn't make sense to make a 'story.' It wasn't like I photographed her before she was blind and then she went blind… she was dealing with it. It was that process of dealing with it and just realizing that life flows forwards and backward—and that's just the way it is."