SORROW IS ALL THE PAIN OF LOVE

SORROW IS ALL THE PAIN OF LOVE is a visual diary that explores trauma, identity, and transformation. Dealing with chronic depression and burnout, Oliver Raschka investigates how trauma caused by behavioral and emotional disorders, addiction issues within the family, the death of close relatives manifests visually. Created from photographs unintentionally taken between 2004 and 2025, the archival work shows how intergenerational family issues shape a person’s identity. It’s only years later, as part of trauma therapy, that these images transform from unconscious records into active agents of reflection and transformation, exploring the causes of attachment and developmental trauma. With the distance of time and the strength to metabolize past experiences, the archive itself becomes valuable. By recontextualizing what once emerged without intention, the archive gains clarity and emotional resonance. According to Roland Barthes, the photographs form a resonance board as a punctum that evoke strong sensations and memories of events that reach back to childhood. Their fragmentary moods, distortions, and accidental framings become metaphors for psychological rupture, generational patterns, and the long shadows cast by childhood experience. The reinterpretation of images that were once taken unconsciously offers a psychogram: a map of fragmented memories that serves as a reclamation of the self. The archive reveals the conflicts inherent in lived reality, which ultimately serves as a catalyst for change.