Article

By Bill Cooke | 14 September 2009

Since death itself brings forth no worries, observed Epicurus, why should the anticipation of death be any different? Good question, and maybe he's right, but most of us will probably remain anxious about the prospect of dying. Unlike death, the business of dying gives every indication of being unpleasant, undignified and painful.

These musings were brought on after going to Davis Funerals' Pakuranga office to see the exhibition ‘Caring for the Dead', by Bridgit Anderson. Coincidentally, I'd been to the same place for a funeral only a fortnight or so previously. Now I was returning, to see the attractive villa set up gallery-style to accommodate these 33 photographs of various stages of the business of death. Very well done it was, too. So well done, in fact, that it sent me back to an exhibition of photographs by Diane Arbus in Los Angeles in 2004 to find something at the same level.

I was first alerted to the exhibition when TV1's Close Up ran a feature on it. Days later it was in the Aucklander lift-out of the NZ Herald. So, clearly, here was an exhibition that was attracting interest. The unusual aspect of the whole thing, and part of the reason for this, was that Davis Funerals was hosting the exhibitions. They see the exhibition as demystifying their profession. It's interesting that, while in their hands, the exhibition is called ‘Caring for the Dead', while earlier exhibitions at galleries had gone under more fancy titles such as ‘Looking at Others: The Death Project', or ‘Reveries: Photography and Mortality'. Davis Funerals are to be congratulated for hosting these exhibitions in Auckland, but it's probably fair to say that their title doesn't really capture the full range of what the exhibition is about.

Anderson discerned four different categories of photograph. There were the shots of the mourners, shots of the burial grounds, shots of the corpses themselves and shots of various scenes from inside the funeral parlour as people got on with the job of dealing to the dead. The photographs of the mourners were, for me, the least captivating. This is not to say they were unsuccessful. But we have become accustomed to seeing powerful images of people suffering in various contexts. The best photo of the mourners was the one which did not offer a tableaux of suffering. Rather, its qualities merged with those of the funeral director employees going about their business. On the left of the photograph was a group of Maori relatives performing a noisy haka for the deceased. Just behind them, and almost in the centre of the photograph, was a policeman, perhaps on escort duty from prison for one of the bereaved. And to the right of the photograph, standing by the door to the chapel are two funeral director employees, arms folded and faces set in the mould of professional solemnity, but with also a suggestion of impatience with the noise generated by the exuberant haka. This photograph, along with those of the funeral director employees, carried the true power of this exhibition. These shots, of ordinary people working in unusual situations, on or next to dead bodies; washing hair, grooming dead hands, weighing corpses, checking paperwork, and various other less well defined activities, were the strongest ones. These were the shots that did the demystifying that the funeral directors spoke of.

In fact, the best of them did not include people at all. Particularly clever was the photo of the three black suits, possibly just back from the dry cleaners, on coat hangers hanging in the staffroom below the shelf on which sat back issues of the American Funeral Director magazine, an old issue of Time and, more incongruously, The Dodge Magazine. Staff rooms: doesn't matter the profession, they have a sameness about them. Then there was the photograph of the casket, with its lid slightly ajar and sitting on the lid is a standard airline travel bag, black, the sort small enough to accompany us onto a plane but big enough to hold a computer and a couple of changes of clothes. Arrivals and departures.

Another photograph, one that caught the attention of Close Up when it covered the exhibition, was of the woman reading the paper which she had spread over a casket. She was wearing a thick Katmandu jacket, suggesting her break was being taken in the mortuary. Close Up focused on this shot in the context of asking whether there was something irreverent or even disrespectful about this. It concluded, rightly, that it wasn't anything of the sort. It's another one of those everyday activities. On their break people will have a gander at the paper, and if you can lean it on something, all the better. Life goes on.

The best of the photographs of the burial grounds shared this simple quality of life going on. One of them showed a man, a gnarled, wiry little man, digging a grave on a misty day, handing up an object, presumably found in the hole he's working on, to one of the men standing around him. The others are just beginning to take an interest in the recovered object. Like the photographs of the employees going about their business, this straight-forward image is oddly arresting.

As noted, an important reason for the success of this exhibition was that it was not in a gallery. True, it has been exhibited in galleries, in Christchurch, Ashburton and Sydney, last year. And it's off to Finland's Museum of Photography from September until January 2010. No doubt it has been and will be a success in those settings. But for me, who saw the show at a funeral director's office where, as I say, I had actually attended a funeral only a short time before, place was everything. Much is said about the relationship galleries have with art, how it corrals art into set spaces with dynamics of their own, usually around selling enough items to pay the rent. Much is also said, usually in the same context, of art out in the community, with the suggestion of how good that is. Well, here is an example of this happening. It may not be what enthusiasts for art in the community had in mind, but there you are. The single sheet of A4 I was given on arrival had the list of all the photographs, but no price tags attached to them. That's when you realise you're not in a gallery. It's remarkable what a difference that makes to the way you read the A4 sheet.

The secrets of Anderson's success are not hard to discern. In fact, they're not really secrets, or shouldn't be. There are four of them. First, of course, the technical skill Anderson displays with these photographs. In particular her decision to shoot in black and white was wise, as so often the most powerful photographs are in black and white. The second point to remember is that Anderson spent a year working in the funeral business to get a feel for her subject. During this time 3000 photographs were taken, and from which we are seeing 33 of them. Distilling from a collection that size takes time, if you are to avoid sentimentality, melodrama, cliché, and voyeurism. You can't rush good work; whether it's art or anything else.

The third secret to Anderson's success was that she had something to say. And again, the time spent working at the funeral directors would have been important in working out precisely what it is she was trying to say. And in the end, like most important things, what she wanted to say was simple and straightforward. ‘What I'm dealing with,' writes Anderson, ‘is quiet, ordinary, everyday death.' There's a fine line between simplicity and banality, and Anderson avoids the latter by the intensity of her concentration and quality of understanding of what she is trying to do.

The fourth secret to the success of this exhibition is that it was not in a gallery. I have no doubt it can be managed well in a gallery, but something important to the message, and the medium, would be lost in that setting.

We are all going to die, wrote Richard Dawkins, and that makes us the lucky ones. Bridgit Anderson's exceptionally well-conceived and produced work helps us appreciate that important truth with skill, care, tenderness and an artist's eye.

Bill Cooke