Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

Photography

Life Before Death…
Walter Schels’ Portraits of People
Before and After Death

via Beautiful Decay

At the end of life: a camera lens, desperately recording and archiving the fears of the dying. For the series Life Before Death, the photographer Walter Schels captures the terminally ill in anticipation of the unknown and again in the moment after death. These intimate portraits are the last of a lifetime, documenting the body after some ineffable human essence has vanished. Informed by the words gathered in interview with the subjects by Schels’s partner Beate Lakotta, the haunting shots imagine the invisible, giving form to the most unconquerable human fear.

Schels’s portraits, in their silvery black and white tones, are reminiscent of Victorian post-mortem photography, presenting the dead as if sleeping, their eyes closed and brows gone slack in seeming comfort. These images are poignantly juxtaposed with the interviews, conversations in which even the most mundane, peripheral things of daily life are assigned significance; beside wizened and terrified eyes and coupled with existential wonderings are thoughts on fridge-freezers and local football teams. The banal works against and in service of the tragic; when confronted with death, a burial site and a cup of coffee are equally potent reminders of our mortality.
At the turn of the 20th century, it was believed that the eye recorded the last sight seen by the dead, that with careful study of the ocular nerves, we might reconstruct the moment of death. Schels’s subjects, pictured with gleaming eyes and contained within unrelentingly tight frames, seem to stare into the viewer as they confront inevitable passing, as if to implicate us or to say, “You are the last thing I saw.”

1_50_2

1_52_2

1_55_2

1_56_2-1

1a59f7e8dd235d8d9bc1f49a5e53eee3-large

3f9236a7c01f6749aa877c692b93774b-large

4f5fa4677cee740e01cc0a3fc5a473e2-large

884d50ac689c9561e2d2f2d1cdeba1a4-large

daddc068b91133622841cb40c35f4921-large

Written By

Meghan MacRae grew up in Vancouver, Canada, but spent many years living in the remote woods. Living in the shadow of grizzly bears, cougars and the other predators of the wilderness taught her about the dark side of nature, and taught her to accept her place in nature's order as their prey. She is co-founder of CVLT Nation.

“RIPPED"
“Lev
“BMM"
Sentient 51423

You May Also Like

Hip-Hop

Today I’m on some straight bugged out shit…I want to share with you CVLT Nation’s Top 13 Ruff & Rugged Golden Era Hip Hop...

Bizarre

Women have long been associated with food, whether it’s as providers and preparers in the domestic setting, or as a sexual feast to be...

Art

I’ve said it many times, but fuck it, I’ll say it again: we in the West have a very unhealthy relationship with Death. Although...

Bizarre

via The Line Up Although British anatomists often hunted for fresh cadavers in the 15th century, it was only in the 18th century that...

Copyright © 2020 CVLT Nation.