What Empty Chairs Teach Us About Love: A Photography Project

That empty chair isn't empty. It's Filled With Love.

When someone significant leaves our daily landscape—through death, divorce, kids leaving home, or any major life transition—they leave behind spaces that suddenly feel charged with meaning. That side of the bed. Their place at the table. Their favorite easy chair, gaming chair, desk chair, and even a car seat.

These spaces look empty to us. But, they're full of presence-in-absence, relationship-despite-distance, love-that-continues-even-when-the-person-doesn't.

Photographing empty chairs is about both documenting loss and about exploring the mystery of ongoing connection, the way love persists in the spaces between us.

erica marsland

The Empty Chair Project

What you'll need:

• A chair (kitchen, park bench, office chair, favorite armchair, any chair)

• Your camera (any kind of camera)

• Various locations

• Willingness to sit with both presence and absence

STEP 1: SCOUT

Don't start photographing yet. Instead, notice chairs. Empty ones, occupied ones, chairs that call to you for reasons you can't name. Notice how context changes meaning: an empty chair in a crowded restaurant feels different from an empty chair in your bedroom.

Pay attention to your emotional response to empty chairs in different settings. Which ones feel lonely? Which ones feel peaceful? Which ones feel full of possibility?

polina kuzovkova

STEP 2: DOCUMENT

Photograph empty chairs in various contexts:

• Your loved one's favorite spot

• Somewhere they never sat but you wish they could

• A place you go to feel connected to them

• Somewhere that represents possibility or future

• A space that feels like waiting or anticipation

  

Try different perspectives: close-up details of worn fabric, wide shots that show the chair's relationship to its environment, angles that include shadows or light patterns.

STEP 3: PRESENT YOUR SERIES

This is optional but powerful: Occasionally include yourself in relationship to the empty chair. Not sitting in it necessarily, but near it. Your hand on the back. Your shadow falling across it. Your feet visible at the edge of the frame as you stand nearby.

Notice: Do you photograph yourself approaching the chair, sitting beside it, or walking away from it? What does this reveal about where you are in your relationship to absence?

For Deeper Work: For each photograph, ask: What is this chair holding? What kind of presence lives in this absence? If this space could speak, what would it say about love, memory, continuance, or possibility?

The Psychology of Sacred Space

Anthropologists have long studied how humans create sacred space—places where the veil between ordinary and extraordinary becomes thin. Empty chairs often become inadvertent shrines, spaces where we practice ongoing relationship with what or whom we've lost.

When we photograph these chairs, we're documenting our own capacity for continued connection across the apparent divide of absence. We're creating visual proof that love doesn't end when physical presence does.

Real Stories from Our Community

"My wife's favorite chair stayed exactly as she left it for two years after she died. When I finally photographed it, I realized it wasn't a shrine to death. It was a monument to all the quiet Saturday mornings we shared. The emptiness was full of our contentment." —Chris, Maine

cristofer maximillian

"After my divorce, I kept photographing the empty chair at my kitchen table. But somewhere around month three, I realized I was no longer photographing loneliness. I was photographing freedom. That chair had become a symbol of peace, not abandonment." —Jennifer, Chicago

"I photograph empty park benches obsessively since my father died. He was never one for sitting in parks, but somehow these benches feel like all the conversations we never had and all the peace I wish I could have given him." —Michael, Louisiana

martin podsiad

Advanced Chair Work: The Time-Lapse of Your Relationship

If you’re ready to go deeper: photograph the same chair once a week for a month, paying attention to how your relationship to that space evolves over time.

Week 1 might show a chair that feels abandoned. Week 4 might show a chair that feels expectant, peaceful, or even welcoming. Document not just the chair, but your evolving relationship to the absence it represents.

Notice how changing light, seasons, or your own emotional state transforms the meaning of the same empty space.

Let’s Go Beyond Chairs

Once you've worked with chairs, expand to other spaces that hold absence:

• Empty beds (the other side, a child's room after they've left)

• Vacant parking spots (where their car used to be)

• Empty picture frames (relationships that ended, dreams that changed)

• Unused doors (rooms you don't enter, paths you don't take)

• Spaces at tables (family dinners with missing members)

roberta sant anna

Each empty space has its own story about presence, absence, and the continuation of love across apparent voids.

Your Final Challenge

1. Choose your chair thoughtfully. Let it be one that carries emotional significance, even if you can't immediately articulate why.

2. Vary your contexts. Move the chair, then photograph it in different settings and notice how location changes meaning.

3. Include yourself selectively. Your relationship to the empty space is part of the story. If you choose to not be included in the image, that says a lot, too.

4. Document the evolution. Return to the same chair multiple times and notice how your perspective shifts.

5. Honor what you discover. Empty chairs often teach us surprising lessons about love, continuance, and our own capacity for carrying relationship across space and time.

6. Share your sacred spaces. Sometimes witnessing each other's altars to absence helps us understand our own.

chang hsien

When you complete this project, you just might discover that empty chairs are never truly empty. They hold afternoon light, the echo of conversations, and the invisible architecture of love that persists long after someone leaves. Through your lens, you've learned that absence can be its own kind of fullness, that sacred space exists wherever we're brave enough to acknowledge it, and that sometimes the most profound presence is found not in what fills a space, but in our willingness to honor what it holds.

My father's chair still standing there
All alone since the long night
Now it's three years on and I still feel
He'll come home, we'll be alright

So where's this healing time brings?
I was told the pain would ease
But it still hurts like the first night

That night my brother, my mother and I
Were looking up at a distant star
And wishing we could reach that far
And back in the house
And alone for the first time
We told each other we cared
We avoided my father's chair

I watch my family, we hold on
We are strong and we'll be alright
The clock continues counting down, all the while
And every child will share the long night

But do the spirits meet again?
Why am I still so filled with doubt?
Is my soul everlasting?

And the far distant future
When I knew you'd be gone
Came too fast and stays too long
Why do they leave the weak of spirit
And take the strong?

When the world turns sour
And I get sick from the smell
And I can't find no comfort there
I climb into my father's chair