Art and death

Post mortem photography

20 February 2012
Charles
1 Comment
Categories: Art and death, Attitudes to dead bodies, Attitudes to death, bereavement, Children, Dead people's rights, funeral customs, funeral photography

Posted by Vale

We had quite a debate recently when we published some recent post mortem photgraphs.

They were respectful, intriguing and, some of them, quite lovely in their own way. But they made us – and some of you – uneasy. Did the photographer have permission to publish? Was it right to expose the dead – so vulnerable in their invulnerability – to public gaze in this way?

We weren’t always so squeamish. Back in the days when photography was still a new art, the idea of photographing the dead was seized on as something that, like embalming, preserved ‘the body for the gaze of the observer’. The quotation is from an interesting essay by an American, Don Meinwald, about Death and Photography in 19th Century America.

The photographs were for private consumption rather than public sharing and Meinwald links them to the Ars Moriendi tradition of funeral portraits. Photographs of children were especially treasured:

These photographs served less as a reminder of mortality than as a keepsake to remember the deceased. This was especially common with infants and young children; Victorian era childhood mortality rates were extremely high, and a post-mortem photograph might be the only image of the child the family ever had. The later invention of the carte de visite, which allowed multiple prints to be made from a single negative, meant that copies of the image could be mailed to relatives.

The quotation comes from a portal site over on Squidoo with lots of links. Fascinating. Macarbre. Unbearably poignant.

Scattering the ashes

17 February 2012
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: Art and death, ashes

Posted by Vale

“And when did you last see your father?
Was it when they burned the coffin? Put the lid on?
When he exhaled his last breath?
When he sat up and said something?
When he last recognized you?
When he last smiled?

When did you last see your father?
The last time he was healthy, active?
The last time he had an argument about something?

Those weeks in which we tried to say goodbye
were like a series of depletion’s.
Each day I thought
‘he can’t get less like himself than this.’
Yet each day he did.
So I’ve been trying to recall
the last time I actually saw him.
The last time he was unmistakeably… there.
In the fullness of being,
I dunno… him.”

The closing words of the film – And when did you last see your father? – spoken by Colin Firth.

The film can be found here.

The original book by Blake Morrison here.

Quote of the day +

8 February 2012
Charles
3 Comments
Categories: Art and death, obituary; epitaph

 

Posted by Vale

Wislawa Szymborska – Nobel prize winning poet – died last week. In a piece in the Guardian she was reported as saying:

“For the last few years my favourite phrase has been ‘I don’t know’. I’ve reached the age of self-knowledge, so I don’t know anything. People who claim that they know something are responsible for most of the fuss in the world.”

She was a fine poet. Here’s one she wrote about death:

On Death, without Exaggeration

It can’t take a joke,
find a star, make a bridge.
It knows nothing about weaving, mining, farming,
building ships, or baking cakes.

In our planning for tomorrow,
it has the final word,
which is always beside the point.

It can’t even get the things done
that are part of its trade:
dig a grave,
make a coffin,
clean up after itself.

Preoccupied with killing,
it does the job awkwardly,
without system or skill.
As though each of us were its first kill.

Oh, it has its triumphs,
but look at its countless defeats,
missed blows,
and repeat attempts!

Sometimes it isn’t strong enough
to swat a fly from the air.
Many are the caterpillars
that have outcrawled it.

All those bulbs, pods,
tentacles, fins, tracheae,
nuptial plumage, and winter fur
show that it has fallen behind
with its halfhearted work.

Ill will won’t help
and even our lending a hand with wars and coups d’etat
is so far not enough.

Hearts beat inside eggs.
Babies’ skeletons grow.
Seeds, hard at work, sprout their first tiny pair of leaves
and sometimes even tall trees fall away.

Whoever claims that it’s omnipotent
is himself living proof
that it’s not.

There’s no life
that couldn’t be immortal
if only for a moment.

Death
always arrives by that very moment too late.

In vain it tugs at the knob
of the invisible door.
As far as you’ve come
can’t be undone.

By Wislawa Szymborska
From “The People on the Bridge”, 1986
Translated by S. Baranczak & C. Cavanagh

You can buy the People on the Bridge here.

My Southbank Deathfest

30 January 2012
Charles
12 Comments
Categories: Art and death, Attitudes to death, bereavement, death and funerals, End-of-life issues

Posted by Vale

Some personal reflections on the Southbank Deathfest this weekend:

Imagine a wire and steel footbridge over the Thames: brown water lapping, St Paul’s, pale in the wintry light, downstream. Drop down to buildings, a collection of concrete and glass halls that were modern once but which, in the way of those brave 50s buildings, now feel curiously dated.

Inside, people. Lots of them. It’s like an arty concourse in a railway station. Not everyone has come for the Deathfest – though hundreds of them have – but it seems that the lobbies of the Royal Festival Hall are a gathering place for Londoners anyway. The mill of people – talking, drinking coffee, mooching about, characterises the whole of the Deathfest. The day is made up of different events – talks, Death Cafe’s, discussions, stalls, happenings. Each of them has a charge of energy – and, depending on the venue and what’s going on, this mill of people round about sometimes makes them seem open and dynamic and, sometimes, dissipates them so that it is impossible to concentrate.
Actually there was a general sense of mild chaos everywhere. 

Decorative coffins from Ghana

Through the door and, whoop! there are old friends and GFG regulars – Sweetpea, Belinda Forbes, Charles (whose phone rings constantly so that he is no sooner there than darting off again) and Gloria Mundi.There seemed to be friends of the GFG everywhere. Our religious correspondent Richard Rawlinson, Ru Callender, Fran Hall and Rosie Inman-Cooke at a very lively NDC stand, Tony Piper and then GFG heroes like Simon Smith from Green Fuse, Shaun Powell from the Quaker initiative in the East End, helping poorer families to a good funeral. James Showers, Kathryn Edwards too. Who have I missed out? Who did I miss?

If I am honest there was a lot that was interesting, some that was moving and a little that I thought was not really for me as a practicing Celebrant. But it wasn’t aimed at the likes of us and it was hugely exciting that so many there had come for themselves, to find out and start their own explorations. At the sessions I took part in – where the question was asked – I think 80%-90% were ‘ordinary’ people.

I enjoyed an NDC hosted talk about the need to prepare for death. It made me realise that, as a celebrant, almost all of our time is spent with families after the event. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to meet people earlier? I came away with a resolution to start to make a video recording as part of my own end of life preparations. Just, you know, to make sure a few good things get said. Met an inspiring spiritual midwife too!

After, off to the Beyond Goodbye session that began with Charles’ talk and closed with the film and questions about Josh’s extraordinary funeral. Well, extraordinary because of the film and the standard and quality of what was done, but, I wanted to call out, there are lots of ‘extraordinary’ funerals now. Any family can – should – have one. But that hardly needs saying here. Josh’s mum and brother though came across as pure gold. It really is worth watching it – find the GFGs original posting here. The website for Josh and for Beyond Goodbye is here.

I hung on to my seat (this was in the smaller Queen Elizabeth Hall) because after Josh came John Snow and the assisted dying discussion and lot’s of people wanted to see that.

At the end of a lively discussion I’m with Helena Kennedy on this: let’s, for goodness sake, have a proper commission about end of life issues. We’re mired in piffling debates in the Leveson enquiry and the doubtful (but surely unsurprising) morals of newspapers when there is an issue here that is both urgent and important and where popular feeling is pulling ahead of the current legal position. Society as a whole would benefit from open, reasoned, public enquiry and debate. I feel a GFG campaign coming on…

There were lots of things in the discussion that did make me think – especially the realisation that assisted dying has to be considered in the whole context of how we, as a society, treat vulnerable people. The whole debate would change – wouldn’t it? – if we could be confident that we treated the elderly and disabled generously, with respect and true consideration?

So much that I didn’t see. Paul Gambaccini’s session on Friday about Desert Island Death Discs, the poetry, Paul Morley and Sandi Toksvig – but I still came away with a sense that, maybe, in places like the pages of this blog, in the work of pioneers like the NDC and the Quaker Social Action project, and most of all in the energy and interest of the people who came and took part, we really might be able to bring death our lives. One thing is certain – we need more festivals like this one.

The Travelers – Elizabeth Heyert

27 January 2012
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: Art and death

See the full photo essay (16 photographs) here. 

Over the course of one year (2003-2004) Elizabeth Heyert photographed the deceased members of a Baptist community in Harlem. Heyert took her photos at the funeral parlour of Isaiah Owens, one of the few places where the old tradition of festively dressing up the dead lives on.

All of The Travelers photographs are accompanied by the name of the person in the portrait, as well as their date and place of birth and death. Significantly, the individual stories of each photographed person are absent from the work, in spite of their value to Elizabeth. I asked Elizabeth why she didn’t make them part of the project. Elizabeth explains that it was mainly an issue of privacy. Although the stories were important for her to be able to establish intimacy with the subjects, they were not really meant for public consumption. They form the narrative of a community that Elizabeth is not a member of. She wanted to be careful not to be presumptuous and act like she belongs to this community. Therefore she did not claim the stories as part of her project.

Moreover, she found that including the date and place of birth and death was already very effective in triggering the imagination. These simple facts indicate that the majority of the 31 portrait-sitters grew up in the south of the United States and moved north. This information alone calls upon a whole history. Elizabeth identifies it as the story of the 20th century, when black people took the journey from the south of the US to Harlem, in search of a better life. It was the only way for them to escape from poverty, even though the situation in Harlem wasn’t perfect either. It was a way they could take control of their lives.

Source

Jazz requiem

12 January 2012
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: Art and death, bereavement, funeral music, funeral poetry

Posted by Vale

This lovely jazz piece was actually a requiem for Charlie Parker – but at risk of offending purists I thought Frank O’Hara’s poem for Billie Holiday on the day she died fitted perfectly with the music.

The Day Lady Died

It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille day, yes
it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don’t know the people who will feed me

I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days

I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness

and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it

and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

Humanising the ancestors

10 January 2012
Charles
7 Comments
Categories: Art and death, ashes, memorialisation, Memorialising

We get quite a few emails here at the GFG from makers of ashes urns. Most of these urns are ghastly and get no more than a thanks but no thanks. We are unfailingly courteous.

This morning was an exception. We received some stunning images from a Plymouth-based ceramist, Alan Braidford — in answer, it almost seemed, to Richard Rawlinson’s post earlier on today. Wonderful work, we’re sure you’ll agree. There are virtually no makers of funeral urns whose work has evolved beyond the container-of-some-sort stage, but Alan’s urns are anthropoid — they are sculpted figures of humans. What a difference that makes. Depending on size, perfect for a garden memorial or for a family altar to the ancestors. Okay, so we don’t do altars to ancestors. Ours is a developed culture which has lost touch with the value of ritual observances based in an idea of duty. For the sake of our own emotional health, we need to reinvent these observances, and Alan’s work points the way. Do you think they speak too much of grief?

Here is Alan talking about what he does:

My ceramic work is figurative and mostly stoneware. The work is on a domestic scale ranging between 30 to 150 cm in height.

Although my natural impulse is to make sculpture, I am very interested in making functional pieces, and with this in mind I have been developing a series of simplified sitting figures to be used as funeral urns. As this work will be fired to 1250c it will be frost proof, and thus can be placed outside in a garden setting. Ashes or memorabilia can be placed inside the urn through an opening, before the ceramic is fixed to a stone base.

The look of my work is influenced by an interest in ancient history – Celtic, Etruscan, Cycladic and Middle Eastern.

Coiling is the construction process most employed, although I am currently developing a press moulded process in order to reproduce one of the urn designs.  Slips,engobes and lava glazes are used to add surface texture.

Alan is also interested in working collaboratively with bereaved people in the matter of design. If you want to contact Alan, write to him at alanbraidford(at)btinternet(dot)com. His website is here. 

Immortalising mortality

6 January 2012
Charles
No comments
Categories: Art and death

The Dying Matters Coalition is holding its very own Death Booker (well, something like that). Dying Matters is offering a prize for “new creative writing about dying, death and bereavement. Anyone touched by dying, whether directly or as a relative, friend, colleague or carer, can enter.”

The judges will be looking for original writing in which the author’s feelings and thoughts about the end of life have been crafted into a succinct piece of work that attracts the reader’s attention and retains their interest. 

Prizes

1st: £200; 2nd: £100; 3rd: £50; plus highly commended certificates. All entries will also be considered for publication online or in print form.

The winners will be announced during Dying Matters Awareness Week, 14-20 May 2012.

The project could lead to the publication of a selective anthology and the formation of an archive, and we expect it to generate considerable public interest.

More details on the Dying Matters website here. 

Remembering Josh

13 November 2011
Charles
2 Comments
Categories: Art and death, ceremony, coffins, funeral directors, funeral music, funeral photography, Grief

“REMEMBERING JOSH” is a film that records the life of our son Josh, as it was remembered at his funeral early in 2011. Josh Edmonds died in a road accident in while traveling South East Asia in January 2011. He was 22 years old. Our film is both a tribute to him, with many wonderful musical contributions and anecdotes, as well as a reflection on what it has meant to us to organize a fairly ambitious event in such a short space of time. Over 300 people attended, many of who were meeting for the first time having come buy generic cialis from different parts of Josh’s life. We found that organising the funeral ourselves without recourse to a traditional funeral director, was of immense value as we struggled to come to terms with our loss. We’d like to thank all those who helped and supported us, and without whom this event would not have been possible.

Here’s the full film of Josh’s funeral made by his parents, Jimmy and Jane. James Showers characterises a good funeral as “a collision of grief and beauty”.  No one has ever expressed it better. James is the ‘non traditional’ funeral director in this film.