When she was only three years old, Hannah Modigh (who would later become a photographer) moved with her family to India, where she stayed for about four years. During that time, while her parents worked, she and her sisters were cared for by Sivagami, a woman who, for a stretch of the road, became part of their family. A central figure, present and loving, yet without any real rights within their lives.

According to the photographer, it was a precarious balance, made of affection and dependence, where every gesture was sincere but inevitably marked by a deep asymmetry. When the Modigh family returned to Sweden, Sivagami cried. Hannah, still a child, thought they were tears for their departure. Today she wonders whether they were rather tears for her own uncertain future.

Thirty years later, Hannah Modigh returns to India in search of Sivagami. Her photographic project, which became a book, is titled Searching for Sivagami and is as much a physical as it is an emotional investigation. There’s no certainty of finding her, no concrete clues, only vague memories and feelings. But it is precisely from these fragments that Hannah builds her visual narrative, moving through streets they might have walked together, on beaches they might have shared, in neighborhoods where perhaps Sivagami once lived.

During her journey, the photographer meets women who do not resemble Sivagami in a literal sense, but who share her social condition, her experiences, her vulnerabilities. She photographs them, and in each of them she searches for something: a reflection, an echo, a possibility.

These images become double portraits, in which Modigh captures both the woman in front of the lens and an imagined — and perhaps idealized — version of Sivagami. The result is a powerful and melancholic narrative, speaking of loss, memory, but also of the way relationships shape — and distort — our identity.

Hannah Modigh’s Reflection

Searching for Sivagami is neither a reportage nor a diary, but a reflection on distance, on childhood, and on what remains of those who once loved us. A delicate attempt to fill a void that no photograph can ever truly fill — but that, through photography, can at least be acknowledged.