Photographing Death

I wanted to produce a narrative of my mother’s loss and regret. The used flowers signal the death of my mother, the vase was hers and the picture empty picture frame is a device to let the viewer occupy the photograph with their memories.

‘As the fascination that photographs exercise is a reminder of death, it is also an invitation to sentimentality. Photographs turn the past into an object of tender regard, scrambling moral distinctions and disarming historical judgments by the generalized pathos of looking at time past ( Sontag 1971 p55)’

Dead flowers with empty picture frame

Photographing Flowers

As part of an experiment, I chose to photograph flowers that my partner Jane had kept from our first meeting. She had them hanging on her study wall. It was, at least I thought, providing a link from my past to the present day. Following a meeting with Sarah, I decided not to continue with the idea. It did not fit with my other work, but I found it useful in experimenting with technique. The use of text in the photograph was an attempt to explain the narrative.