A Delayed Goodbye

Boneless down the Bonner Loch
Jim Romer

OVERVIEW

A Delayed Goodbye is a photobook shaped by memory, displacement, and the quiet difficulty of leaving a place that has already begun to leave you. Rooted in the artist’s years in Bonn, Germany (2014–2020), the project reflects on a city not through spectacle or landmark, but through atmosphere, repetition, and small acts of attention. Streets, riverbanks, skateboarders, fragments of architecture, and passing light become part of an intimate visual language through which belonging is slowly negotiated.

Moving between documentary observation and personal reflection, the work considers what it means to remain emotionally tied to a place after one’s life there has already shifted. The “goodbye” of the title is postponed, incomplete, and unresolved: less a single moment of departure than a lingering state of attachment. Photography becomes a way of holding that delay, allowing the city to appear not simply as background, but as a quiet collaborator in the shaping of identity, memory, and loss.

Skateboarding runs through the project not as spectacle, but as method—a way of reading surfaces, learning the grain of a place, and negotiating permission, friction, and care in public space. The photographs hold what gathers around action: pauses, laughter, fatigue, friendship, and the ordinary infrastructures that make a day possible.

Designed as a book with a folding structure that reveals content through its centre, A Delayed Goodbye mirrors the project’s emotional logic: memory does not unfold in a straight line, but through layers, returns, and partial disclosures. The work offers a meditation on care, time, and the fragile bond between person and place.

DETAILS

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