Article Title How Is Absence Made Visible? Photography, Memory, and the Representation of the Invisible

This article examines how photography can make absence perceptible without reducing it to an empty space or a clearly identifiable loss. Drawing on Roland Barthes’s phenomenology of photography, Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotics, and theoretical approaches to memory and representation, it explores the relationship between photographic traces, temporality, visual ambiguity, and personal experience. The article approaches absence as a relationship between what has existed, what remains visible, and what can no longer be fully recovered. It argues that photography does not restore the past but can make the distance between past and present perceptible. Combining theoretical reflection with a discussion of visual representation, this work considers the limits of photographic evidence and the role of memory and interpretation in the production of meaning.