When Hannah Modigh returned to southern India after thirty years, she was looking for the woman who had cared for her and her sisters. Sivagami had belonged to their childhood household while remaining dependent on the family as an employee. Searching for Sivagami follows the emotional uncertainty of returning to this unequal but intimate relationship: the places remembered by a child cannot simply restore the person who once inhabited them.

Modigh photographs women she encounters, streets, temples and beaches, seeking familiar gestures and traces of companionship rather than a straightforward reconstruction. Her attention to small details belongs to a wider practice concerned with memory, inheritance and the passage between stages of life. The search eventually leads to Sivagami herself. A key on a red cord around her neck opens a tin chest of treasured possessions; a photograph of Modigh’s sister Hedda rests on the box. Sivagami dies shortly after their meeting, giving the recovered relationship a painful finality.

The book makes this change of knowledge physical. Its accordion structure can be read from two directions, creating two chapters: uncertain childhood memories give way to the more relaxed encounter and descriptions of family-album photographs. Published by Kult Books in 2024, the 88-page volume allows the reader to move between recollection and recognition instead of treating memory as a settled sequence. The Swedish Photobook Prize jury singled out this two-way form when nominating the book in 2026.

For a collection concerned with family photography, this is a distinctive examination of who is included in a family image and who remains outside its customary account. The connection between paid care, affection and sisterhood complicates a nostalgic return. Its importance lies in the way the book preserves both the uncertainty of searching and the consequences of finding, letting an intimate encounter revise the photographer’s earlier memories.