BlackFlash Magazine

Volume 26.1, 2008 issue of BlackFlash Magazine, a photo, art, and theory magazine from Saskatoon, SK, Canada, featured my new suite of prints in their Death Issue. Here are most of the images or page spreads that were created for this project. For the first time in my art practice, I used appropriated images scanned from my own collections. You may recognize the casket photos from an earlier blog entry.  Included in this suite was a poignant excerpt from Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters, a must-read for all literary driven thanatophiles. A good on-line full text source is here.

These passports are from all over (Turkey, Argentina, Canada, Italy) and include my intrepid traveling aunt and my own taxi license from when I was a young university student.

These glass negatives are from a junk shop located in Butte, Montana. I was especially attracted to the damaged ones, although I also obtained a collection of amazing portraits from the late 19th to early 20th century.

This page of old studio photographs with the empty portrait settings were made from scans of vintage prints and tintypes where I digitally removed the sitter; their absence being a poignant reminder of loss and fading memory.

The above grid is made up of images from my collection of port mortem portraits of young children that I am building. You will see (and have seen) selections from this collections periodically on this blog.

And finally, this page spread of skulls was gleaned from the internet and represents a wide range of individuals. What I find especially interesting, is that they all seem to maintain their own identity and even personality. The numbers alone allude to our uncountable predecessors and the nameless faces that once were.