“Death is a very dull, dreary affair, and my advice to you is to have nothing whatsoever to do with it.” (William Somerset Maugham)

Rituals and rites connected with death and funeral are almost as old as the human race itself – and so are beautifying and decoration of the dead. In many cultures people still prepare the body for the funeral. There are so many unique burial rituals in the world and so many ways that different cultures treat their dead.

Researchers have found burial grounds of Neanderthal man dating to 60,000 BC with animal antlers on the body and flower fragments and gifts next to the corpse indicating some type of ritual. In 1822 in South Wales, the remains of the “Red Lady” (actually a man) were discovered – a skeleton, dyed with red ochre, surrounded by grave goods and shells. The man lived 26,000 years ago, the oldest ceremonial burial discovered in Western Europe. Anthropogenic mummies of humans and animals have been found on every continent.

For most people, a dead body is an uncomfortable thought and death itself such a foreign concept. Perhaps using rituals can help people relieve negative feelings and acknowledge the reality of the death. Is it so difficult to accept death as a fact of life? Are these rituals some kind of symptoms of necrophobia –  in many cultures dead are believed to have powers over the living, such as the ability to bless or curse ? Or is it a form of death denial?

VANITAS (from the Latin adjective vanus ’empty’)

Albrecht Dürer : “Beauty lies even in humble, perhaps ugly things, and the ideal, which bypasses or improves on nature, may not be truly beautiful in the end.”

In 1918, Tristan Tzara, Dada’s chief theorist, trashed beauty as “a boring sort of perfection, a stagnant idea of a golden swamp.”

A Vanitas is a symbolic work of art showing the transience of life and the certainty of death. Vanitas themes were common in medieval funerary art and they could be extremely morbid and explicit. From the Renaissance such motifs gradually became more indirect and, as the still-life (nature morte) genre became popular, found a home there.

In my Vanitas photography series I wanted to reject commonly held notions of beauty. What makes an object / photograph beautiful? Is beauty inherent in the object itself or is it because people say the object is beautiful that we assume it is? I had no intention of making ‘‘pretty’’ pictures, pictures that fulfill some vague criteria of taste or beauty. To do this, I wanted to discover different « dead body beautification rituals » of various cultures. I did not find rosy pink tinted formaldehyde (used in embalming in the US) in my corner shop, so I had to use more traditional methods – makeup, jewelry, amulets, linen strips, herbs, spices, egg & vinegar…

I think that a photograpf of a subject traditionally considered ugly, unappealing, undesirable, or even downright repulsive can still be esthetic. What exactly is deemed ugly or repulsive, of course, remains in the eye of the beholder.