inspiration

sven · 2005-03-14 17:44:37

What we see here is a fundamental expression of human emotion that is without a doubt in my mind coming from the deepest chasms of our learned behaviour. The agonees are the leaders who strive to free themselves of the chains that bind us all. Just as we look upon The Kiss or The Potatoe Eaters to free our minds and delve into the world of another to share their reality,... their beauty,... their agony. I devote these few short words to the Agonees.......Sven

yYYYYy · 2005-03-15 06:08:14

the face...also inspires me. i have a book GRANTA 27:DEATH, containing a series of photos DEAD FACES by Rudolf Schafer.

This is all I could find on the web http://puk.de/virtual-museum/magazin/12 … hafer.jpeg

Here's the accompanying text (pardon my typos):

Photographing the dead is not new - in the last centruy it was quite common- but pople do find the idea rather strange. Many people today don't know waht a dead person looks like. In modern society we are separated from the event of death: someebody becomes ill and goees into hospitaland then there's a phone call or a telegram informing you of the death and the bodyh is perpared an dput in the ocoffin, and the coffin is put in the grave and that's it. There i sno direct experience of what death actually loks like and popel have formedc this notion that it must look terrible because the events leading to it were terrible.

Theswe photographs may also seem strange merely because of the way i've presented them. A full-face portrarit, perfectly natural in life, seems unnatural in death. These are ordinary poses. We are constantly bombarded with newsppaer and television pictures of catastrophes and wars- violent, extreme pictures- but we defuse the thought that nothing so extreme will ever happen to us. Woith thehese pictures you simply don't have that optionln.
They were all taken in the Pahtologigical Instutute of the Charite- an old university clinic here in Berlin. It was not particularily diffiuclt to get permission: sometimes i obtained the consent of the relatives; in other cases that wasn't necessaary. Of the deatd themselves I knew only ta few details: when there were born, when they died, what they died of . Nothing more. These people all died of natural causes. People remark that they all look very peaceful. That is th e point: there is nothing special about these fac3e4s. The peace of this moment, this coming to rest: this is what dead people look like.

Even so, some people readct with moral outravge: how could I rob these people of their last remaining possesion, their dignity? They have a point and I;m not denying that the moral dilemma exists, but you have to reach beyond it to see what i sperhaps more improtant, namely, the questions the pictures raise in our own minds about ourselves. To me the ictures have a terrible beauty; they are beautiful. At the same time, the wquestion they pose cannot be avoided. The one thing I think I learned during this period is that life is too short to waste on unimportant things. These pictures show what will surely become of us all one day, and we should therefore take a little bit more care over our lives.

Interview conducted and translated from the German by Piers Spence.

yYYYYy · 2005-03-15 17:49:01

when i saw the DEAD FACES pictures for the first time i was shaken as one undergoing a nervous breakdown or spiritual cracking at the core of one's soul or strange anatomcal disturbance - the experience was total: emotional, spiritual and bodily.

you can't see in the low-res picture that's posted in the liink above but that face has a tear running from his eye.

msnevil · 2005-03-19 05:14:31

What is so sublime about faces "dressed up" after death?

Note: The tear is proberly "embalming fluid."

yYYYYy · 2005-03-19 09:08:24

the dead in these photos were "new arrivals" that were just wheeled in, their bodies had not been lifeless long enough to undergo the services of a mortician.

you have to see for yourself. it is the way they are photographed.

on a side note, the framing of these photos is identical to that of the agonees...which gives me an idea which i hope doesn't sound like i'm being sick for the sake of entertainment.

would anyone be interested in videotaping the final minutes of their life? it'd be just like doing a BA video except instead of coming the person is going, then they are gone.

the end image would look precisely like one of the above dead faces pictures.

if you were handed a videotape of your own death by someone from the future, would you watch it?

Let's take a single person, x, starting from birth, ending at death, one man or woman...anyone will do. We'll shoot x in the same way as DEAD FACES and BA, camera looking down on the face...at various points in x's life, in a myriad of ups and downs, and then let's link them all together, hundreds maybe 1000's of these face shots, to create an epic document of a life:

baby x looking up at mother, kid x lying on a hill looking at cloud shapes, adult x doing the BA thing (repeated many times at different ages), and then several episodes later, several decades later, after facing all of life's beauty and agony we see x's final face.

Last edited by yYYYYy (2005-03-19 10:00:39)

richard · 2005-03-19 12:21:11

Timothy Leary wanted to broadcast his death on the internet, which seemed to me a bit sad, in an attention seeking way.

It's interesting that this thread was started on Agony, as we have a new project in mind. Part of the content would be photographs of (staged) dead naked peiple, We're still debating the ethics of it. It's the sort of thing you could present as art and nobody would pay too much attention, but as a pay website it would probably be accused of all sorts of evil intents.

msnevil · 2005-03-20 02:55:33

Actually, My Job leads me to be in contact with dead people. All the time.

And Death is not pretty.

While Art might disquise and make if look Beautiful. In Reality, it is not.

Those faces you see. They are cleaned up after Death. And then Photographed.

If you want to see "true" faces of death. Go to the websites that do not "glorify" it. That show death in all its gory detail. And then tell me, how beautiful it is.

Or better yet, Become a paremedic, Nurse, Emt. Etc.

(As for Richard. There is many websites That deal with "sleeping" fetishes. Perhaps you should delve into that. And escape the Ethical delima that a Necro Fetish would produce. Even if it was "staged".)

Of course, I'm dealing with the Realist stand point. The Fantasy approach certainly would appeal to some people. As shown by the "dead" pictures and glorification of "death". In the medieval age and the 19th century.

But such "Myths" dealt with the Escape of "hell" on Earth, and the Glories of "heaven". At least From the medieval stand point. The 19th Century photographs were more of a Fantasized "death" exploration. Leading to the Water shed Spiritualist movement of the Early 1900's.

Btw- Respectfully, Paint the Body a pale grey pasty color or Dark purple to get the True "dead" look. And then Do only B\W photography. Your model looks like a Model who had a mascara accident and went to sleep.

http://www.portaldapereba.hpg.ig.com.br … pecial.htm (The first pics are of a serial killer and his lover photographing thier exploits.)

http://thanatos.net/galleries/categorie … t_id=1(450 turn of the century, death pics.)

http://www.stormpages.com/veckansgore/E … storia.jpg

(please note, I wish orgasm video's were as easy to find as death pics. )

yYYYYy · 2005-03-20 07:41:56

i'm not sure what i'm talking about half the time, thanks for bouncing back with
insightful comments, msnevil.

i'm not saying that these pictures tell the forensic side of the deaths of these individuals.

what touched me in the dead faces photos was the photographer's approach: the sameness of the framing from face to face to face...the effect was like looking through a Yearbook of the Dead. it caused me to reflect on my own death in the context of all the people who have ever lived and died. it let me imagine myself being in that same book. of course, another person with a whole different set of personal and world views might see these pictures in a completely different way.

if i were looking at atrocity photos that showed me corpses with missing limbs and squashed skulls i probably would've reflected on the cruelty of war, how lucky i am to live in a peaceful country. if i were looking at accident photos I probably would've reflected on how precarious life is, how close we are to falling over the edge without realizing it, all it takes is one nudge at any moment and it's the end. of course, another person who was a death fetishist might just eat these up for the splatter factor alone, and couldn't/wouldn't see beyond that base level.

Richard: you are so right about how the framing of such content largely determines public response to it. The key idea of BA itself is not faces, it is framing. The medium is the message

using the dead for aesthetic reasons or for spectacle or because it has built-in goth glam, is something that can be stimulating - or not. But that is not something that interests me.

but do i have a problem with it? absolutely not, go for it!

here are some crime scene photos that struck me with their magical realism when i first saw them in a Harper's Magazine...

http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0374523 … eader-page

Last edited by yYYYYy (2005-03-20 08:07:11)

#1 2005-03-14 17:44:37

inspiration

#2 2005-03-15 06:08:14

Re: inspiration

#3 2005-03-15 17:49:01

Re: inspiration

#4 2005-03-19 05:14:31

Re: inspiration

#5 2005-03-19 09:08:24

Re: inspiration

#6 2005-03-19 12:21:11

Re: inspiration

#7 2005-03-20 02:55:33

Re: inspiration

#8 2005-03-20 07:41:56

Re: inspiration

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