Ellen Virgona’s Photos Draw on the Depths of Grief and Mourning

Certain losses change your life. Others, though, change the way you see it. The Australian photographer, Ellen Virgona, knows this better than most. 

About nine years ago, Virgona’s mother suffered a heart attack that ended up hospitalising her. Seeing her hooked up to a respirator in a Sydney intensive care unit, Virgona handed a camera to her mother’s nurse, while she and her father positioned themselves on either side of her mother’s bed, smiling. It was the last family photo she would ever have. 

“At that moment, I felt it was important to have,” she told VICE. 

Virgona’s mother passed away when she was 21. Five years later, her father passed, too. What came shortly after – and in between – was a desperation to capture everything. An urgency to document “as much as possible”, as if every instant had to be savoured, catalogued, somehow reachable. 

In the 10 years since, doing so has become a core tenet of Virgona’s photography, as much as her practice has become a crucial piece of the way she processes the world around her.

The result is a body of work that offers itself as a cathartic framework for grief and, more broadly, feeling. Through her new book, Four Seasons, she hopes her work might offer something similar to others as well. 

“Particularly in Western culture, there is so much stigma around discussing grief and loss,” Virgona says. “I had a doctor once tell me that if I was still sad about my mother’s passing six months on, I would need serious help. As if it were an abnormal concept, as an only child at 21 years-old, to still be hurting from the loss of my mother.

“Over time, I have come to believe that feelings of grief and mourning do not go away. Instead, those feelings become different over time, and we learn how to manage ourselves around them. This is my way of managing that.”

The approach has been a constant in her life for the better part of the last decade. Like the photographers whose work she cherishes most, Virgona doesn’t see any point in being selective about what she shoots. Her work is an endless stream of “everything” punctuated by contrast. Feelings of delirium are made clearer alongside those of despondency, just as loss is made clearer by new friends, old friends, or great loves.

“I often wonder if we can really recognise happiness without suffering,” Virgona says. “All things become more clear when compared. Seeing the dismal and the beautiful together in this way, laying them alongside each other like awkward cousins, has helped me learn to structure my grief.”

When she grows old, she says, she doesn’t want to look back on her life, only to see “the special moments.” The opposite is what attracts her eye, even when she isn’t shooting for herself.

“It’s funny, often when making selects of my commissioned work, I’m always leaning towards the images that are in-between shots. An awkward face of a subject in the middle of a conversation, or whatever I consider to be ‘honest’ moments. I think it’s something I’m always subconsciously searching for with my visual eye.”

She was even more conscious of it when she was putting together her book. Four Seasons brings together a selection of photos laid out in order of the seasons as they were shot in different corners of the world. Like the seasons, she says, “mourning is cyclical”. 

“The only reliable thing about it is that it always resurges.”

Each time it does, Virgona learns something new. 

Ten years is a long time, and each time she looks at the images that have come to comprise her new book, “everything changes”, she says. “Whether that be two months, four years, or a decade later, our memories are reframed constantly. So too are the ways we were feeling in that moment, and how we choose to remember them.”

What doesn’t change is how she sees the body of work as a whole. It’s “an archive of time,” she says. And she’d be happy if it isn’t seen as anything more. 

“Things change so quickly we aren’t able to really see, and I mean this in the sense of fashion, architecture, subjectivity overall – these are all fleeting things,” Virgona said.

“Most of the photographs that are in the book have never been shared before. You see everything on social media now and I wanted to create something tactile, tangible, where the viewer could be in the moment, not just click ‘next’,” she said.

“When I started taking photos, it wasn't for the purpose of anyone else to see, it was really for myself and I think it takes an individual creating self-initiated emotional content that is not needed, but makes this world a better place.”

Four Seasons will be on show at China Heights from 6 p.m. on Friday, April 8, until Sunday, May 1, at 16/28 Foster St, Surry Hills NSW 2010. The book, along with a limited number of prints, are available for purchase through the gallery. 

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