Bryce Camp

In Memory Of

Artist's Statement:

Death is a topic we as humans find difficult to talk about. It is also a subject that is sort of looked over due to the graphic scenes, stories, and music that people see or listen to everyday. Death sometimes does not resonate with people until it is someone close to said person. It is seen as ugly, usually pictured as the Grim Reaper, in his all-black drapes, scythe, and skeleton body. I want draw attention to the memorials that people put out to give awareness of an accident or just to show how much that person meant to others. I plan to try to get people to see death not as the ugly subject we know now, but as beautiful and freeing. To do this I will photograph anything that was left as a memorial for someone to show awareness and the beauty of these landmarks left for the deceased. 

In the creating of each image taken I will look at each subject as a natural still life where everything in the image is relevant to the subject of the shot. The materials I will use to create these images in my Nikon D3500 and an external flash. After the final images have been selected, I will print them in color and frame them in an 8x10 size image. The subjects will be photographed in different locations to show that memorials are not a local practice, but one done in multiple areas. The titles of the images will simply be the name of the person that the memorial was left for if it is on or near the landmark. To make the pictures will be approaching the subjects like a documentary photographer. There will be no photo manipulation with only minor editing to have the correct colors. Doing this will create an honest representation of the memorials and show the true beauty of the memorials that have been constructed or placed in the memory of someone who has passed. 

Postmortem photography has been looked at and studied since the mid-19th century where photography extended the traditions of mortuary paintings. Many artists in different areas of the art world referenced or worked with death as a subject matter. In 1890, Vincent Van Gogh painted "Sorrowing Old Man (At Eternity’s Gate)," a painting recreated from an earlier lithograph that depicts an older man face down in his palms, which shows the emotion in the grieving part of sadness and loss. Pablo Picasso and Caspar David Friedrich also had painted works that depicted different subjects that related back to death, Picasso having a skull in a still life, and Friedrich painting an actual cemetery. All are beautiful works and though depict a hard subject, show the beauty that can be created and that will come again after the dark times of death's shadow. Paintings were not the only ways people documented the beauty in death, but photography as well. Families would get the recently deceased and pose them in ways as if they were alive for the sake of getting a family portrait. Some artists like Edwin B. Ives would pose his subjects in ways that seemed as if they were just sleeping. All these artists worked with death firsthand and took portraits of the deceased not long after death. The study and fascination with postmortem death continued throughout the years and can be seen in artists like Christian Boltanski, Stephen Chalmers, and Jeffery Silverthorne, just to name a few. Christian Boltanski took found photographs of Holocaust victims and would manipulate the image to show only the face of the person and pair it with a physical prop to give the viewer another story of what may or may not have happened. Stephen Chalmers dives into the history of roadside memorials and how they were placed by Spaniards in the 1700 where the death occurred and how the Roman Catholic countries would leave them as "resting places," for the pallbearers would rest while carrying the deceased to the graveyard. Jeffery Silverthorne took his photographs in the morgue right as the deceased arrived to be autopsied, developing the images in black and white to give each victim soft highlights and make it as though they were simply sleeping. 

In today's society death is viewed in different ways that all have histories of their own. One view is “The Tame Death,” where the person who is passing knows it is coming soon and gathers their loved ones in a familiar place to be with them as they leave this world. While some may look at it like the time of “The protestant reformation and the privatization of death and dying” this stage was where religion came into effect and the thought of good and evil people and the question of “Do you think they are in heaven” became a prominent question.  With the rise of capitalism also came the rise of a person’s wealth and belongings, this time death wills make more evident and “legal distributing of fortunes”. All, society have many different views and thoughts on death, but I want to show the beauty of these different rituals, thoughts, and ideas of death and how they are constantly changing. 

People leave mementos for lost loved ones in many ways. It may be in the form of a small cross somewhere, a statue at the cemetery, a set of fake flowers on a headstone, and many other different things to show that, that person meant something to do. These objects do not just represent death, but the entire lifespan of a person, a person that was so important to someone that they want to show the world by placing these objects places. That to me is what makes death beautiful, not just the ending of pain and suffering, but the ways people show recognition to those that have been lost and how life goes on even after death. 

"Bryce Camp" written in Zapfino script