Nostalgia for Strange and Unfamiliar Places

Andrei Tarkovsky’s Polaroids, 1970s-1980s.

There’s a peculiar weight to feeling *fernweh*, a longing for places you’ve never seen, as if your soul recognizes landscapes your eyes have yet to witness. This nostalgia isn’t tied to memory but to imagination—an inexplicable pull toward streets, skies, or shores that exist only in the hazy periphery of your mind. Perhaps it’s a yearning not for a place itself but for a version of yourself you might become there, shaped by its strangeness and yet oddly at home in its unfamiliarity.

Journaling Prompt: Reflect on the weight of longing for places your eyes have never seen but your soul somehow knows.: think of a nostalgia not for memory, but for possibility—an ache for the version of you waiting in the unfamiliar.

Andrei Tarkovsky took his Polaroid photographs primarily during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Many of them were captured in Russia before he left the Soviet Union in 1982, and others were taken in Italy while he was working on *Nostalghia* (1983). His Polaroids reflect the same poetic, melancholic, and atmospheric qualities as his films, often depicting landscapes, everyday objects, and intimate moments with a dreamlike stillness.