Death Observed

Through photographs of dried fish at a market and flowers drying at home, Death Observed traces a shift in looking: familiar things become bodies that once lived, and their stillness begins to suggest movement.

Death Observed brings together photographs of dried fish at a market and flowers drying at home. I had known them as things to buy or keep, scarcely noticing that they were also bodies that had once lived. Recognising their death unsettled that familiarity. Strangely, it was then that their motionless forms began to suggest movement.

Looking more closely, I began to distinguish individual bodies within the bundles. Fish tied to face the same way had once moved independently through the sea. The difference between those imagined movements and the fixed arrangement before me made the familiar display seem strange. With the flowers, following the curve of a dried stem led me to imagine its next posture, even though it had already stiffened into place.

I photograph these bodies both among everyday things and at close range. With the flowers, I also unwrap and reposition them, looking from different sides and photographing what had surrounded them. This brings another uncertainty into the work. Separating a flower from its bouquet reveals a body I had overlooked, but choosing its position also fixes how it will be seen. Am I looking more closely, or simply holding it in a pleasing pose? Trying to see movement can make the stillness more pronounced.

Sometimes, looking for longer revealed an unexpected beauty. Yet the thought that these surfaces had once been alive kept interrupting that absorption. Their former life and my own life as I looked at them were ordinary facts; together, they felt slightly unfamiliar.

The photographs stay with this small disturbance in looking. The fish will still be sold, and the flowers will go on drying at home. Their place in the everyday has scarcely changed. Yet once I have seen them as bodies, they keep returning to mind.