Back in 2016 BBC published a literary work called Taken from life: The unsettling art of death photography, that peeked back into Victorian times in which death of family members were captured as a reminder to the old adage “memento mori” meaning “remember you must die”. Death, as an enigmatic, and possibly seen as a violent end to life, has been the subject of numerous artists, from Caravaggio in the 16th century to more modern abstract & surreal artists like Francis Bacon & Dali.
Over the years, numerous photographers have intentionally photographed the death of someone very close to them. Unlike journalism that takes gruesome pictures of death, destruction & suffering in wars & conflicts, epidemics & executions like those captured by photographers like Robert Capa, Don McCullin, Eddie Jones & others, these images of death & the dead are rather different. Apart from the morbidity of the subject & the unsettling nature of the moment, photographing death of someone as close as a father, mother or an offspring could be both cathartic & full of vitality.
Richard Avedon
I don’t attempt to make a statement about each person as an individual. I’m always more interested in what my feeling is about just living. I strongly voice my emotions in my photographs … this is a composite portrait of the power elite, but I feel nothing at all for the majority of these people.
Avedon
Richard Avedon photographed his father Jacob Israel Avedon dying of cancer, with his white hair, skin pale and transparent and in nervous distress. The raw expressions of pain, helplessness and fragility were debated in numerous forums. Avedon’s father thought living in this world is a battle while his mother wished for him to let go of the security concerns & focus on art.
These images were exhibited in MaMA in 1974. However, there were mixed reviews, with the scathing one from Gene Thornton, claiming these images lack the classic, calm finality of truth that puts the superficially similar portraits of Diane Arbus in a class by themselves.
Nobuyoshi Araki
You have to go on photographing the moment of life; you have to go on living. For me, taking photos is life itself. The camera itself, the photograph itself, calls up death. Photography is love and death.
Araki
Although Nobuyoshi Araki, born in 1940 in Tokyo, is more known for bondage, eroticism and death as the main themes of his photographs, in his book, Sentimental Journey, Araki explores life from 1963 to 2018 between love and death & photographs the relationship in life, as in death, of the his wife Aoki Yoko, who died of uterine cancer in 1990.
This could be seen more as a tribute to Yoko, who in Araki’s words “It’s thanks to Yoko that I became a photographer.” Even after Yoko’s death, Araki continued to photograph her memories. His subjects ranged from her black and white cat Chiro & images of the sky taken on their balcony that captures the essence of her ghost.
Diane Arbus & Amy Arbus
I’m fully aware that memories change over time and that they get informed by other people’s opinions and the state you were in then and the state you are in now. I would love to say this was a huge [emotional] catharsis but I feel like it was photographically so important for me to have done this work.
Amy Arbus
Diane Arbus personalized humans who are rarely understood without their covers – cross-dressers, nudists, sideshow performers, tattooed men, the nouveaux riches, the movie-star fans—and by those who were trapped in a uniform that no longer provided any security or comfort.
Her death by suicide prompted her daughter, Amy Arbus, to conceptualize a project to depict an experience of passing away. She took a single roll of black and white self-portraits in a bathtub, where she began to confront and consider the death of her mother Diane Arbus, who committed suicide in one on July 26, 1971.
Yukio Mishima
To see human beings in agony, to see them covered in blood and to hear their death groans, makes people humble. It makes their spirits delicate, bright, peaceful. It’s never at such times that we become cruel or bloodthirsty. Living is merely the chaos of existence.
Yukio Mishima
A few months prior to his ritual suicide by seppuku (aka Hari-kiri) after a failed coup attempt, Yukio Mishima, the Japanese novelist, was depicted in morbid photographs taken by Kishin Shinoyama. These were published in the book Yukio Mishima: The Death of a Man (“Otoko No Shi“), jointly authored by Yukio Mishima & Kishin Shinoyama. Yukio Mishima wished that this body of work, showing Yukio dying over & over again, represent the death of the entire Japanese nation.
Celine Marchbank
Having painfully come to terms with the fact she was going to die, I decided I didn’t want this project to become a graphic portrayal of her death. My mother was an amazing woman, and it would have been impossible, and wrong, to focus only on the dying part. I wanted to look at the things that made her uniquely her. I needed to document it all.
Celine Marchbank
Tulip is a collection of 84 images by British photographer Celine Marchbank. The collection is a raw expression of emotions of watching her mother die of lung cancer. Moments that would other be inconspicuous in regular life become the very subject of focus in this book. When faced with the knowledge of death, every habit, every movement, every expression seem to serve as reminders of happier memories.
Kimmo Metsäranta
Death is still a taboo over here. You are not supposed to talk about it, let alone photograph it. I don’t know why this is. Maybe we don’t want to be reminded of our mortality.
Kimmo Metsäranta
Finnish commercial art photographer Kimmo Metsäranta photographed her grandfather’s death in 2014 in a very personal aesthetic project “To Bury a Father”, where, contrary to finnish customs, she & her sister dressed her grandfather upas a last respect & photographed his dead body in his coffin.
Walter Schels
I hoped to lose my fear of death by doing this project where I had to confront myself with death. I am old enough to think about my own death so it was obvious for me to close the circle between birth and death by doing this project.
Walter Schels
In a well thought out project “Life Before Death”, Walter Schels & his 30 years younger wife Beate Lakotta decided to photograph people who are nearing death or in hospice while they were alive & very shortly after they passed on. It was driven by the morbid thought of creating memories & experiencing separation between the two, given the age difference, one was likely to die much earlier, leaving the other spouse behind with nothing but memories.
Organization like “Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep” is a non-profit group of professional photographers who help parents photograph their babies who die at birth. It might sound strange but there could also be solace in preserving death in silent pictures. “Remember my Baby” is another UK based non-profit organization offers free photography services to families who are enduring loss of a child.
Jeffrey Silverthorne
Dear Jeffrey Silverthorne, listen—All I Know—when you are dead you go into that Hole and that is it. It is painful to look so long—So sharp at It. But once you stepped over that line.—Well, it becomes another photograph. It’s not ART—how horrible, if it would be—And maybe the photo tells me (us?) how wonderful it is to be alive. It’s the one thing which counts. And some of us don’t live long enough—when you got to go—you got to go….
Robert Frank to Jeffrey Silverthorne in a fax message on Directions for Leaving
I wanted to conclude this article with the 84 haunting images by Jeffrey Silverthorne published in his book Morgue, of pictures taken between 1972 to 1973, at the state morgue of Rhode Island. Taken by the plethora of changes, including the birth of his child & the reported news of thousands of people dying in the Vietnam war, Jeffrey wanted to evidence death first hand & chose the morgue to be his studio.
With the permission of the state’s AG, a corpse was sent to the state morgue if there are unknown or violent circumstances surrounding the death. Over time the project evolved into anything but a documentary, it became a portrait of dreams and failures, a residue of realities all rendered by Silverthorne with complete respect and total disregard.
As a prelude to this collection of images of dead, Jeffrey Silverthorne shared his conversation with Diane Arbus who was a visiting guest at his college. He asked if she had ever photographed a dead body, “No,” she replied, “Why would I? There’s nothing interesting going on there.” The reply stunned him. This was the time of the Vietnam war, when battlefield photography and death was televised daily. The Arbus comment led Silverthorne to seek out and commit to the subject.
Death will always remain an enigma and most of us will miss the vitality of death, overcome by ignorance, fear and worst of all denial. But many traditions look at death differently. Many families look at demise differently and often immortalize the event with pictures.