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23 Nostalgic Photos That Speak to the Heart

By Ellyn Kail on June 5, 2018

Urban Sprawl – Emptiness © Emmanuel Monzon (@emmanuelmonzonphotography)

Suburbia. Silent Dance © Dominik Dunsch (@dominikdunsch)

Curtains from a home I loved © Emiliano Zuniga Hernandez

“When we are nostalgic, we take pictures” Susan Sontag wrote in 1973’s On Photography. “Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.” For our latest Print Swap online group show, we chose not to focus on any particular subject–in the past, we’ve done landscape and architecture photos–but on a singular mood. These photographs have made us wistful, evoking the past through old or outdates objects, lonely vistas, or even peculiar and beguiling tricks of the light.

From Emiliano Zuniga Hernandez, who remembers diaphanous curtains of a house he once cherished, to Dominik Dunsch, who transforms a discarded plastic bag into a strange phantom, the artists included herein have hit that bittersweet and ambiguous note we call nostalgia. Fiona Bailey pays tribute to May, a woman who passed away, through her belongings. “Whilst the house has been empty there has been a lamp on a timer in every room to give the illusion that someone is still living there,” she writes. Lost somewhere between the pain of homesickness and the reverie of romanticism, nostalgia is a grey-area within the human psyche, and it’s one worth dwelling in, at least for a little while. In the photographs below, we find reminders childhood hope, the residue of eras gone by, and the traces of love lost.

All the images in this online exhibition are part of The Print Swap collection. The Print Swap is a project by Feature Shoot, organized to connect photographers around the world through a shared passion for art collecting. Everyone is welcome to submit images for consideration by tagging #theprintswap on Instagram. The Print Swap collection is curated by Alison Zavos, the Founder of Feature Shoot, and all participating photographers receive a print from another participating photographer. The prints are mailed randomly, so any given photograph could travel just a block or many thousands of miles before it arrives at its final destination. It’s free to submit to the swap, but selected photographers pay $40 per image to participate. Learn more here.