Gradient Loss

Gradient Loss is the second chapter of a trilogy on grief, made after my father’s passing.

It marks a deliberate shift to monochrome — a decision born from the sense that colour had begun to feel intrusive — and retools photographic technique as a language for altered perception: absence, dilution, and the slow erosion of attention.

Across the series, I experiment with masking, in-camera compositing, long exposures, and light-painting to create layered, incomplete images. Objects — from eggs and pears to cactus, flowers, and ritual props like horns and knives — become carriers of presence, memory, and loss. The body often appears fragmented, silhouetted, or motion-blurred, emphasizing grief’s compartmentalized and shifting nature. Repetition, ritual, and meditative gestures recur, reflecting how mourning operates quietly, cumulatively, and sometimes ambivalently.

Gradient Loss by William Joe Josephs Radford

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