Essays

In Light Of Death

Photography is the most pervasively democratic of all art forms. It is the Great Equalizer of the arts, allowing everyone to express a point of view, regardless of background or education. It is, by nature of the craft itself, the only art form whose primary exigency is to address, record, and interpret life as perceptual reality, in all its incomprehensible glory and goriness, fully engaging the world around us.

Death is the most pervasively democratic of life’s occurrences. It is life’s great equalizer, allowing everyone the unalienable right to cease to exist; in the process, expressing a point of view so direct and consequential, it carries the same weight and meaning for everyone, regardless of background or education. It is the inevitable and incomprehensible nature of death itself, that compels us to address, record and interpret life as perceptual reality, engaging, in this case, the worlds around us.

In the many forms that the mannered observance of death acquires around the world, perceptual realities are mixed with perceived subjectivities; resulting in sincretic, graphical expressions -strongly iconic, heavily symbolic- whose intent is to depict, in logoform, the totality of the human condition, as best understood by being in effect, in the human condition. A good example of this is the widely recognized symbol that synthesizes, with simple elegance, the dualistic Yin-Yang perception of the universe.

Life at its beginning is immediately encapsulated in framed photographs of the newborn. Life ends, in most cases, with the encapsulation and framing -physical and allegorical- of body, memories, and mementos of the deceased. But even the momentous wonder that is birth has not inspired our psyches to create as numerous, diverse, and impacting icons and images, as has the inevitability of death. While cute photographs of the newly born are invariably relegated to a life within rococo frames, resting on overdecorated mantelpieces, photographic images of gruesome demise are lusted after by everyone; even collectors and archivists, engaged in the antipodality of validating for posterity the documenta of death.

Ritualized celebrations of death -such as Día De Los Muertos- are typically populist. In their observance they suffer no arbitrage from cultural taste-makers. Salt-Of-The-Earth acquires an unusually direct connotation when a body is put into the ground. One can ascribe meaning and transcendence to the harsh reality of death. But the fact is, telling a life-loss-survivor how to interpret grief is a vain exercise, since grief is by instinct, fully articulated as an archetypal logoform, in the reptilian core of our brain.

Similarly, the art and craft of photography is, in essence, a populist act. As in dying, which requires no particular skill, there is no particular skill to pressing a button. Any meaning or transcendence built into the photographic interpretation of a moment is highly personal, and does not require additional interlopers for its correct or proper understanding, as long as the understanding remains personal.

However, it is always our nature to extrapolate higher meaning from our personal experiences. When we give universal connotations to our interpretations of death, we set in place the fundamental cornerstones of religion. Ultimately, all religious thought derives from a fear of death. In fact, most conscious acts in our daily lives, derive from an ingrained fear of death. Even when we engage a photographic moment, we are subconsciously trying to perpetuate an instant to which we ascribe a higher meaning, doing so under the mistaken pretense of objectivity. By activating a camera shutter, we have chosen to give a particular instance a special place in the hierarchy of past moments that is our memory -which is invariably selective; and by doing so, we save that instance from passing away unnoticed, giving it a longer hold on our lives, staving off the imminent demise of its memory. Or so we hope.

A mourner, through the narrow lens of grief, makes-do with remnants at hand -some easily available, some requiring more thought and more expeditionary efforts- to capture the essence of a person’s life in a way that affords relevance and a sense of continuity. As photographers, we capture and bury in a little box, the remnants of light from a particular moment. Some of these moments are immediately available, some require, as before, a more expeditionary effort. Essentially, through photography we encapsulate light. We remove it from our surroundings and put it in a darkened chamber, storing it with the intent -at some later point- of making its remains reappear as a semblance of the original captured moment; a process that allows a comforting perception of relevance and continuity. One would be hard-pressed to find a more expedient metaphor for the cyclical nature of life.

Seeing is the most primitive of our defense mechanisms. It has been integral to our genetic continuity for millions of years. If our forebears didn’t see well enough, they didn’t survive. According to the most current research on evolutionary adaptability, from a purely physiological perspective, our evolved sense of sight is what sets us apart from the rest of our planetary creature-cousins. Life and death are tightly wound around our sight. Consequently, seeing, and the act of recording what we see are at the very core of our survival instincts.

But even with all this recording, remembering and other wishful acts of self- preservation, only one thing remains as an undeniable fact of life (which is, as well, a fact of light): Death approaching is the very last thing we all see.

Michael Mehl
FOTOSEPTIEMBRE USA-SAFOTO
September 2006

N.B. This essay began as a narrative focussed on a brief synopsis of the 2006 FOTOSEPTIEMBRE USA International Photography Festival, of which Ruben Cordova’s and Enrique Martinez’s The Changing Identity Of Día De Los Muertos photography exhibit at the Institute of Texan Cultures, is a part of. But, after seeing Ruben’s striking image on the cover of this catalog -and the catalog’s Cultural Mestizaje subtitle- an epiphany ensued, in which it dawned on me that both the art of photography and ritualized celebrations of death such as Día de los Muertos, have very much in common. As I continued to write, wringing notions and similes out of my subconscious, I realized that there is much more commonality to both -more cultural mestizaje if you like- than I’d ever thought about before. Light and life have always had more than just a passing correlation in the cosmologies of nations throughout history. Light and life are, in fact, the strands that tie all these cosmologies together, surfacing through time as evolving manifestations of our perceptions of the physico-spiritual origins of the human race. Thus, both light and life are deeply intertwined in our perceptions of creational archetypes. The cessation of light is always tantamount to death in classical mythologies. Yet invariably, all classic treatises on death also allow for the resurfacing and renewal of life and light, in a different time, in a different form.This is exactly what photography is all about.