When my grandfather died last year during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, my aunt was the only person allowed to see his body. There was no wake, and after a short burial he was just gone. To comfort my father, she sent him pictures of his dad lying in the casket, and videos of the burial.
For as long as there has been recorded history there have been rituals surrounding death and the preservation of image for memory. From the middle ages until the 19th century masks were created of the dead to be used as references for portraits of them after their passing. Then, in the 1800’s, these masks themselves became a way of preserving their image for memory, until the photograph came around. From photography’s conception it has been used to maintain the lives of the dead. That is true to this day, as seen with the common use of photographs as memorials, in photo albums, at grave sites, and countless other iterations.
Since the loss of my grandfather, I have been interested in how photography functions as a way to preserve the memories of people's lives and why images of the dead are comforting. In order to explore this, and as an act of reckoning with my own mortality, I have used myself as a proxy for the dead and have attempted to both memorialize myself and my life, and grapple with the idea of death as an inevitable sudden rupture from life into nothingness.
See more of the this artist's work:https://jeanzamora1025.wixsite.com/my-site
