POSTCARDS I HAVE NEVER SENT

Every year, my mother recounts her postcard collection. Her carefully organized collection now contains over five thousand postcards. I have my own category: the cards I send her from foreign countries. In 2025, however, not a single new card made it into this category. I traveled half the world, yet I couldn’t manage to address and send even one. In my family, a postcard is not just an image. It’s a gesture. A physical proof that I’m okay, and that despite the distance, I remain connected to my home. It’s one of photography’s simplest, yet most intimate forms. Sending postcards has become a forgotten gesture in our time. Postcard collections grow slowly now, as the physical format has been replaced by digital image sharing. Yet this shift has stripped away something essential: the tangible presence, the deliberate act of choosing, writing, and sending. My travels are dreamlike: a transitional state, detached from everything. During my journeys, sending postcards always pulled me back to reality. Simultaneously a signal home and a bond to what I temporarily left behind. In 2025, I created my own postcards. These images depict the places as I experienced them: dreamlike, sometimes not reflecting reality at all. The narrative is organized around an absence, but remains open. Capturing a floating, transitional state where travel, detachment, and connection exist simultaneously.