As documented and narrated by Saumya Joshi.
Learning to Love // What Never Was is an ongoing body of work that traces my relationship with myself, my home, family, memory, and the slow work of learning how to love after loss. Made across several years, the project moves through childhood, ageing, grief, loneliness, fractured relationships, inherited trauma, and the ordinary moments that shape a life.
Rather than following a linear narrative, the work gathers photographs, family archives, found objects, and everyday observations into a personal landscape where memory shifts between presence and absence. Home becomes less a physical place than something continually reconstructed through recollection, longing, disappointment, forgiveness, and care.
The title reflects a longing for versions of people, places, and relationships that never fully existed outside imagination. It asks what it means to grieve not only what has been lost, but also what was hoped for and never came to be.
The project is ultimately an attempt to understand how love survives disappointment. It does not seek resolution, but remains attentive to the quiet ways healing unfolds, through return, through looking, and through the patient act of making images.
About Saumya: A lens-based artist working across photography, printmaking, and moving image. Her practice is rooted in observation and explores the material life of images, carrying traces of melancholy, detachment, identity, and quiet transformations.