Here Dr Michele Aaron provides, from the visual and media cultural perspectives, an added value analysis of the images generated for this project and the exhibition. Her piece is a reflection of all the images taken for this project – not just those selected for the exhibition.

Death is everywhere yet nowhere in contemporary life. Corpses litter Hollywood films; the threat of violence propels most television dramas; the recently-recovered or slowly dying make bookshelves groan. But the pain and smell of death, the banality of physical, or undignified, decline, is oddly absent. We are surrounded by the facts and features of mortality, yet try not to mention it.

Death was not always such a taboo subject in Western culture, nor so cordoned off from the regular workings of society. Up until the eighteenth century, death was very much an everyday event. The individual would die at home, surrounded by a steady stream of family and neighbours and children. With industrialisation and secularisation, death and dying became an ever more private and stage-managed affair. It became, in fact, more about the loved ones looking on than the dearly departing. For the Victorians, the private rituals surrounding death were enacted in heavily stylized ways. Death was romanticised. Funeral and mourning practices reflected this with the fashion for black mourning attire and the ‘weeping veil’– both made popular by Queen Victoria herself – and for increasingly grand funerals and graves…for those who could afford it. Suburban or garden cemeteries built in the mid to late 1800s, when city churchyards could take no more, provided a new stage for these heightened expressions of grief – and wealth – and one that moved death even further away from the centres of public life. There are some great examples of exactly this sort of graveyard finery amongst the photographs taken for the exhibition: images of statues of winged angels atop tombs; of lines of trees framing stretches of long-weathered headstones.

This emphasis on the spectacle of private trauma came to an end, however, with the horrors that unfolded in the twentieth century. The sheer scale, indeed the incommensurability, of loss in the First World War and of atrocity in the Second, put the lid on such accessorised performances of mourning. In its place, came sombre if not dumbfounded mass sentiment. Such abominations made death somehow ‘unspeakable’, according to certain philosophers at least: it was not just hard to talk about, but impossible to give words to, to comprehend and articulate. Death as a topic of discussion, then, was shrouded in difficulty. At the same time, death as an event was once more being relocated elsewhere. In the second half of the last century, and since then, breakthroughs in the treatment of illness along with the increasing medicalisation of dying meant that the majority of deaths took place not at home or in some distant battlefield but in hospital. Dying, therefore, came to be thought of as something treatable and deferrable, the domain of doctors and service providers rather than intimates. Professionalised and, in various ways, sanitised, death retreated ever further away from ‘nature’; from the mud of everyday life.

In many fascinating ways, the photographs generated by this NHS project reflect both this rich social history and our current times. Given that death is to be avoided, as far as possible, what would the different community groups make of the undertaking? How would they capture life and death? Firstly, that the vast majority of the pictures taken had little to do with the topic of mortality is telling in itself. That so many photographs were of the individual’s immediate environment is hardly surprising then. Such ‘stilled lives’ are to be expected – and there were many shots of fruits bowls, cakes and life’s incidentals – but they also point to how readily the issue of death gets displaced into other things, reminding us not only of how easily euphemism lends itself to the topic, but also how metaphor does as well.

Most of the photographs which addressed death and dying did so figuratively. They provided metaphors for ‘our’ death through displacement. There were countless shots of brown leaves and frosted landscapes; diseased wood and amputated trees. What encapsulated death and its ‘natural’ stages best, it seems, was the promise of winter. Such images are offset dramatically, and sometimes, bizarrely, by the vitality of youth: the antics of young people either occurring in the same shot or in others. One of the results, and clear benefits, of mounting an exhibition like this one, is to enable and enhance exactly this kind of perspective through juxtaposition, through contrasting images with each other: to get to see, again, what is often obvious but rarely shown. And then there were the shots of stuffed animals, heads mounted on walls, and clocks: both life frozen, and time, relentlessly, moving on.

The most common theme, which also appeared across the largest number of different photographers’ collections, figured death as disuse and dilapidation. These images showed boarded-up houses and pubs, and buildings or other man-made constructions being neglected or even demolished. These images figured death at a local level, depicting commercial failure (and the shot of Woolworths was especially resonant here) and community decline.

Where the pictures did speak of death and dying itself, they still did so with varying degrees of explicitness. The photos of graveyards and catacombs, the most common ‘direct’ representations of death, are great illustrations of Birmingham’s garden cemetery history. Indeed, shots of cremation memorials, as well as urns for sale, reflect the changes in the culture of burial too. The only actual dead bodies we see belong to animals. Dead rats, pigeons and fish appear, splayed on wet leaves. They are in situ, for sure, but work very much as counterpoints to the unseen dead that lie beneath the wintry landscapes of Warstone Lane or Key Hill cemetery. And then there were the occasional nods to death’s infrastructure or industry: the photos of doctor surgeries, waiting rooms, emergency services and funeral directors. These tended to be highly objective – insulated, mostly, against emotion, often people-free. The ambulance stands empty; the white-cloaked coffin perfectly fills the frame. In contrast, the various images of groups and families tell richer stories about human relationships and the life cycle. Parents or grandparents embrace children; siblings or school-friends smile, or ignore, the camera. The photos from the older people’s group provide striking illustrations of this largely ignored, and certainly under-depicted, part of the community. But, for me at least, the multi-generational images – whether at the hospital or graveside – are the most powerful. Combining the emotion, and emotiveness, of the ‘family’ shots, with the matter-of-factness, and under-exposure, of the ‘older people’ pictures, these images wear life’s worth and fragility the most eloquently.

Sources :

Aries, Philippe. Western Attitudes toward Death from the Middle Ages to the Present. Trans. Patricia M. Ranum (London: Marion Boyars, 1974)

Geoffrey Gorrer, Death, Grief and Mourning (New York: Arno Press, 1977)