Genevieve Ackland, Missing (Hugo). (PEOPLE 2020)

Hugo immigrated to Australia from France in 2017. Wistful for his homeland, he’ll sometimes get quiet and sentimental, indulging in a sense of missing, a common theme in any one of us living abroad. I’ve been married to him for three years, and for much of that time Hugo has felt transient, no longer fully belonging in France, and neither being fully accepted in Australia. It was only last year, on our annual visit to his home city of Toulouse, that fed up and tired he casually told me, “I can’t wait to go home”. We both paused and smirked at the shift in words. Home means a different thing now, or perhaps it is duplicated and exists in two places, and this series of images shows the spectrum of complicated feelings, tangled up in living on the other side of the world from your childhood, These images were captured on 35mm film using a 1964 rangefinder camera.

Images have been resized for web display, which may cause some loss of image quality. Note: Original high-resolution images are used for judging.