The Death Mask in the Darkroom 3: Some Photographs

Third in a five-part series. Read the previous post here.

It’s a truism of contemporary life, particularly contemporary American life, that we avoid the idea of death like the plague. In this, not entirely spurious interpretation of how we live now, Americans hide away any and all reminders of their mortality. We sent our elderly off to die in old folks’ homes, but when that nomenclature started sounding too frank, we renamed them (nursing homes) and renamed them again (retirement communities) and again (continuing care centers). We removed cemeteries, no longer called burial grounds, from the center of town to its outskirts. We talk about funeral “homes” and call the deceased “our loved ones,” “the departed,” anything but “the dead.”

Like many a critique of contemporary society, it sounds good. Problem is, it only takes in half the picture. Consider the following pictures, offered in chronological order, of the dead and soon-to-be.

 

Josef Koudelka’s Jarabina, 1963.

 

Emmet Gowin’s Rennie Booher, Danville, Virginia, 1972.

 
Nicholas Nixon's Tom Moran, Boston, 1988, from the People with AIDS series.

 

Hannah Wilke's Intra-Venus Series, #7, August 18, 1992 (right panel of diptych).

  

Film still from Bill Viola's Nantes Triptych, 1992

The selection, admittedly selective, pushes back a little against the notion that we shun the very idea of death: in fact, the pictures become more and more immediate with each passing decade. In the 1960s, Josef Koudelka’s gathering of gypsies around the coffin is such an anachronism — the long skirts and babushkas, the humble cottage with its hand-plastered walls — that it couldn’t possibly implicate us, could it? His subjects look as though they’ve wandered in from centuries before, and his handling of the image underscores this sense of a sanctified time past: the family, feet firmly planted in this world, cluster together in the dark, fallen world while the young woman is bathed in beatific light.

A decade later, Emmet Gowin updates this sensibility only a little. As with Koudelka, the contemplation of the dead is frank: we’re staring really at the body in the open casket. The same reverence is in the room, though, and a similar sense of the past. But here, you feel as though that way of life is slipping away, that the passing of Rennie Booher, “dead now and committed to mystery,” as Gowin puts it, represents the end of something more than an individual woman’s life.

A decade later, the AIDS crisis made death a familiar again, something experienced by the young as well as their grandparents. In Nicholas Nixon’s portrait of Tom Moran, the light — like Koudelka’s and Gowin’s — may still caress, but the details of the scene place this deathbed unambiguously in the present tense. Moran is a young man, and we’re struck by the weight of that fact. But it is those telling details — the hospital-issue nightgown, the neatly furnished room in the background — that ground this photograph so firmly in the commonplace.

With her self-portrait, taken in the 1990s as she was dying of lymphoma, Hannah Wilke strips away the pieties. Gone is the reverential tone: the lighting here is hospital-flat and the setting, as far as we can tell, impersonal. Wilke confronts us straight on, but her expression, though hard to read, doesn't seem confrontational. At times, I think she is pleading and, at others, bored. And when I look again, I think, no, she's just waiting.

Bill Viola's Nantes Triptych lays out like a Medieval altarpiece: the left panel  (featuring video of childbirth) and the right (his dying mother) flank footage of a body floating in water. This piece, like virtually all of Viola's work, may be aiming at the transcendent but, as with Wilke's self-portrait, you're firmly in the contemporary world and the deathbed vigil takes place in an institutional hospital setting.

Fifteen years on, Viola is still contemplating the borderline between life and death. His Ocean Without a Shore video installation, which debuted in the Church of San Gallo at the 2007 Venice Biennale, imagines the dead coming back to the world, if only for a short moment. The piece, constituted of three plasma screens mounted on the church's altars, shows black-and-white footage of individual people emerging from the darkness. As they move toward us, they pass through a transparent wall of water and, as they step through this invisible threshold, the image springs to full-color life. (To get a glimpse of the piece and to hear what Viola has to say about it, click here.)

Viola may be one of the most prominent, and eloquent, contemporary artists taking on the question of life and death. But he's not alone.

Next in this series: The Death Mask Redux