The German photographer Walter Schels and his partner Beate Lakotta presented their work at the Wellcome Collection in London in an exhibition titled 'Life Before Death' just a couple of weeks ago. They worked with terminally ill people while in hospices, interviewed, and photographed them before and just after their death. Their subjects' faces often indicate despair or fear, other times simply happiness or hope. For some, death is only the beginning of something else, something better than their current condition. But, there is something unique about displaying death. Death is the ultimate taboo of our societies, the signified ending in the human corpse, and the signifier or part of the definition of the socially abject. In the photographs of the exhibition the moments of the 'before' and the 'after' are beautifully captured in empty backgrounds. There is nothing else in the pictures, other than the fragmented faces of these people, like limbs of an already mutilated body. Muscles let go, eyes close, mouths open slightly, indicating the just recorded movement of the lips as they open to let their last breath. Silence, stability, melancholia. This is it. This is what you get. The bodies desire to communicate the inevitability of their state. No fanfare, no trumpets, just the silent passing from being to non-being. It is as if the corpse says in his captured beauty: 'actually, this is not that bad.'
The cleanness and sterility of the black and white photographs seems rather appropriate for the space in which the photographs are presented. (The largest charity in the UK for biomedical research, the Wellcome Trust spends millions every year to support the best and most innovative scientific research projects.) As if out of the chemist's lab the faces in the photographs let the viewer closely examine them and at times they even seem to smile, welcoming the viewer to accept the reality of life's ending. It is ok. Even the short narratives next to the photographs seem out of place, stand out as irrelevant to the beauty of death. After all, in the universal reality of the inexorable relationship between life and death no narrative is relevant. The narrative is abolished, diminished, it vanishes like thin air. The ancient Greeks feared being lost and wished to be remembered after their death (hysterophemia). They also knew that what one can leave behind is just a name. A name, however, dislocated, ripped from its object - that is the human body - means nothing. It is only a sign for a memory and a memory is barely true to one's living existence. But then again, does it even matter? What matters most is that we are suddenly forced to look at the hidden ending, the forgotten taboo, the most real of our reality: death.
