What happens when the images that should have held our lives simply vanish or the photographs that could have anchored our memory, identity and belonging are lost? How do we carry our past? Roland Barthes, in Camera Lucida, writes:
“The Photograph: the punctum: that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me).” (Barthes, 2000, p. 27)
For Barthes, a photograph is more than a picture, it is proof that something existed, that a life was lived and that the moment occurred. Its power comes from the punctum, the small detail that pierces us, connecting presence and loss, life and death. Yet even in his search for proof in photographs, proof and confirmation that the moment and the person existed, Barthes is deeply drawn to what the photograph cannot show. The absence, the silence, the irretrievable past. His writing itself becomes a way to speak into the unseen, to mediate loss when no image can fully capture it. In the context of trauma, this piercing quality of the photograph takes on a deeper psychological meaning.
Trauma is not held only in memory but in the body, in sensation, in affect and in the fragmented recall.
In this case, images/photographs can function as both anchors and triggers. They may ground memory but they can also reopen wounds. A photograph has the ability to collapse time, so that past and present can coexist in the same emotional space. A photograph does not simply represent a moment, it can reactivate it. Viewing a photograph can draw the nervous system back into the experience of loss, fear, or even rupture.
At the same time, trauma is also shaped by what is missing. When images are absent, the psyche is left without visual containers for memory. Loss becomes harder to locate, grief harder to symbolise and identity harder to anchor. The photograph, when present, can hold memory; when absent, it can leave memory suspended in the body and the imagination.
Trauma lives both in what we see and in what is missing: in the image that wounds and in the silence left where an image should have been.
Barthes’ attention to absence therefore resonates deeply with trauma theory: not all suffering is visible, that some memories can not be presented and not all loss can be archived. His writing allows us to understand that the photograph does not simply preserve life but it also exposes vulnerability, impermanence and psychic fragility. It becomes not just an object of memory but a site where time, loss, and trauma intersect. A photograph is where the past continues to touch the present, and where the unseen continues to shape the self.
My mother left Cyprus at fourteen during the 1974 invasion/ intervention, separated from her parents and forced to migrate to the UK. Her childhood photographs were left behind. The images that might have anchored memory and identity were lost. Her early life survives in fragments, in the stories that she tells and are told, in the silences held and the memories carried in her body rather than documented visually. She, like so many displaced people, carries a life unwitnessed in images, yet profoundly remembered internally.
John Berger, in Ways of Seeing, complements this perspective, reminding us that images are socially mediated. He writes:
“The way we see things is affected by what we know or believe.”
“The knowledge embedded in images is shaped by power; who is allowed to see, who is allowed to exist visually.” (Berger, 1972, p. 8)
In this way, trauma exists not only in what is shown but in what is systematically withheld. Shaped by a political gaze that governs what we are allowed to see, who we are permitted to witness and which narratives we are encouraged to empathise with.
As Berger draws attention to the lives and histories that are never made visible, to what images exclude as much as what they show, both he and Barthes offer a lens for understanding trauma and displacement through photography, where absence and invisibility are not neutral but politically and ethically meaningful. Its within the absence that shapes identity, memory and even the way in which we grief. For refugees and displaced people, forced migration frequently entails leaving behind homes, objects, and photographs, the very traces that anchor memory and identity. Without these, memory survives in fragments, in the stories, the embodied experience and the relational memory rather than material proof. Trauma becomes compounded by invisibility, both personal and social.
Berger’s insight shows us that absence is not only personal, it is social. In the UK and globally, migrants are often forced to prove their existence, their identity, their right to belong. Media representations can render lives invisible, suspicious, or disposable, while bureaucratic systems demand documentation as evidence of humanity. Just as a missing photograph fragments personal memory, lack of social recognition compounds psychic rupture.
From a clinical perspective, working with trauma and images or their absence requires sensitivity to this double invisibility. Healing often relies on narrative, symbolisation, and relational witnessing. When photographs are lost or denied, memory is reconstructed through story, art-making, embodied experience, and intergenerational transmission. Trauma and grief exist not only in lived experience but also in archival andsocial silence. What cannot be seen, cannot be held, cannot be photographed.
Through the writing of Barthes and Berger, we find a way to speak into the unseen: to give form to grief for lives and moments unrecorded, to validate memory that survives without visual proof, and to witness identity that exists even when society fails to see it. Displaced lives experience a double absence: the punctum of personal loss and the broader absence of social acknowledgment. Being is lived, but it must also be remembered, reconstructed, and witnessed even when images, archives, and institutions fail to do so.
