This paper explores the role of images as rhetorical and aesthetic tools in evoking nostalgia and shaping both individual and collective identity. Grounded in the author's personal experiences of homesickness and alienation after years abroad, the study reflects on how images encapsulate cultural memories and nostalgic values. Key research questions include: What happens when nostalgic visual narratives become editors of reality and identity?The paper aims to analyze the rhetorical potential of nostalgic images and illuminate how visual constellations influence our perceptions of time, memory, and identity. Using Chrostowska’s article Consumed by Nostalgia? as a theoretical foundation, seven artifacts are analyzed as empirical material to explore ideas of nostalgia but as expressions in visual artifacts. Consumed by Nostalgia? serves both as a basis for the analysis and as an implicit object of study. Complementary theoretical perspectives such as Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalytic view on identity, Roland Barthes’s image rhetoric, and Walter Benjamin’s historical theory are also employed to provide a broader and more nuanced understanding of nostalgia in images.The study demonstrates that nostalgia in images can stem from both direct personal memories and “secondhand memories”—images or notions of the past not personally experienced. It highlights how nostalgia materializes through visual aesthetics and becomes a medium for reconstituting and reframing memories within a new cultural and social context.Moreover, the paper discusses the commercialization of nostalgia, wherein nostalgic images transform into consumer products, and examines how portrayals of childhood in art are shaped by adult projections and a sense of loss. It concludes by considering nostalgia as a performative component in self-identity and cultural identity construction, emphasizing how nostalgic images serve as tools for understanding and processing individual and collective history.