Following a similar trajectory as many other nations around the world the island of Jersey went into lockdown on 29 March in an effort to slow the spread of Covid-19. For many the experience of coronavirus pandemic has been one of dealing with death, both real and imagined. Thinking about the nature of death and mortality in broader terms I began to make images in response to the immediate environment and community in the parish of St Lawrence where I reside. The parish occupies the centre of the Island and much of it is inland, though it has a short stretch of coastline in St. Aubin's Bay. I live at Abbey Gate right in the heart of the village situated next to the parish church and its graveyard. The images here are all made in the vicinity and acts as metaphor for our contemplation of mortality at a time when real death is literally starring us in the face.
From my bedroom window a wide view of the graveyard is visible and at some point in time this room was a carpenter’s workshop where coffins were made. The names of some of the deceased are still inscribed in chalk on the beams in the ceiling, which at night glows likes ghosts. Research during self-isolation lockdown are showing that sleeping patterns are disturbed and vivid, bizarre dreams are occurring more frequently. Perhaps, our nightmares are not narratives played out in our subconscious mind, but in fact a new reality we have to accept. In Camera Lucida, French thinker, Roland Barthes’ most celebrated book on photographic images, he famously reflects on the medium’s relationship with time, and in particularly death when looking at photographs of his mother who had recently passed away. He writes: ‘I dream about her, I do not dream her’.
Brian Pipon whose family have lived in the parish for centuries are visiting the graves of his ancestors. In An Anthropology of Images: Picture, Medium, Body, art historian and theorist Hans Belting talks about the relationship between image and death in different religions and cultures and highlights the inherent paradoxical nature of photography, or more precisely the symbolic function of ‘images [making] a physical (a body’s) absence visible by transforming it into iconic presence.’ It is however not the meaning of death that Belting is concerned with but the quest for the image; both the physical image (either as print or pixels on a screen) and the mental image ‘that live only in our thinking and in our imagination’. Belting cites Gaston Bachelard’s formula that ‘death had first been an image, and it will ever remain an image’, since we do not know what death looks like. In order to understand the intangible nature of the mental image, Belting introduces ‘the gaze as a vector for transmitting mental images to material picture and back.’ In other words; ‘the gaze [is] the force that turns a picture into an image and an image into a picture.’ Maybe Mr Pipon, who because of his age is at risk in a pandemic that appears to kill the most vulnerable first is contemplating the nature of death and how it may appear.
What colour do you see when you dream? This image is in monochrome to remove it a little further away from reality, although photography has always been a copy of the real thing. I found this discarded headstone left at the back of the graveyard, next to the sexton’s tool shed. It made me wonder whose grave this once belonged to and why it was no longer in use. The book shaped stone has a text engraved which is illegible due to wear and tear. It could be seen as a blank page upon which you could write your own epitaph.
As this project develops in response to Covid-19 I realise that living next door to a burial ground is affecting me. From my bedroom window a wide view of the graveyard is visible and at some point in time this room was a carpenter’s workshop where coffins were made. The names of some of the deceased are still inscribed in chalk on the beams in the ceiling, which at night glows likes ghosts.
Research during self-isolation lockdown are showing that sleeping patterns are disturbed and vivid, bizarre dreams are occurring more frequently. Perhaps, our nightmares are not narratives played out in our subconscious mind, but in fact a new reality we have to accept! In Camera Lucida, French thinker, Roland Barthes’ most celebrated book on photographic images, he famously reflects on the medium’s relationship with time, and in particularly death when looking at photographs of his mother who had recently passed away. He writes: ‘I dream about her, I do not dream her.
In an interview in 1977, shortly before he began writing his masterpiece Barthes’ describes his encounter with photography, ‘as a contact with death….at least, this is how I experience photography: as a fascinating and funeral enigma.’ In more recent times, photography’s own demise has been frequently predicted, by a combination of its own success (everyone is a photographer) and digital technologies (undermining truth values.) In Photography Degree Zero, Photographic Historian Geoffrey Batchen provides new perspectives 25 years on from Barthes’s seminal book and asks again; ‘what the essence of a photograph is’, when ‘photography simultaneously conjures past, present and future in a single frame.’