Living with the Dead: Vanitas Street Photography

These images were taken during the Day of the Dead Celebrations in Oaxaca Mexico in 2002. They were exhibited from June 2 through June 26, 2004 at The Silvereye Center for Photography in Pittsburgh.

Living with the Dead: Vanitas Street Photography

Living with the Dead is a collection of vanitas street photographs depicting instances where the dead coexist with the living. These photographs were taken in Oaxaca, Mexico during the 2002 Días de Muertos. They present a somewhat surreal environment concerned with the issues of mortality, loss, and inevitability while underscoring the importance of nourishment, entertainment, caring and love. The project had its roots in both my own interest in the popular Mexican art of José Guadalupe Posada, and the recent loss of my father. Seeing death through the eyes of a different culture was both cathartic and expressive. In these photographs the living embrace the dead and in turn the dead are full of life.

The fiesta of Días de Muertos celebrates the departed souls who return each year to visit their families. Great feasts and offerings of bread and sugar skulls are common in many homes. The arrival of the departed souls is marked with fireworks and joy. Throughout the Day of the Dead celebrations, families unite in thanksgiving in homes and at cemeteries to remember and celebrate the lives of their deceased loved ones.

Vanitas is a genre of still life painting devoted to the contemplation of the brevity and futility of earthly existence. They were popular in the 17th century but have been revisited by many artists including Paul Cezanne, Pablo Picasso, Irving Penn, and Gerhard Richter. Early Flemish paintings contained moral suggestions that devotion to sensory pleasures was folly, and sometimes included inscriptions like momento mori, a Latin proverb attributed to Horace meaning “be mindful of death,” or more ironically, “remember to die.” Symbolic elements common to this genre are a human skull, flowers, rotten fruit, musical instruments, mirrors, timepieces, and candles.

During the Días de Muertos (Spanish for Days of the Dead), Mexicans live in a world filled with symbols of the dead. The calavera (Spanish for skeleton or skull) is unlike that of the western skull that represents death. Juanita Garciagodoy describes the calavera in Digging the Days of the Dead:

The calavera is a sign not so much of death or the dead as of Días de Muertos and all that it celebrates: the completed but continuing life of the dead; their visit to the living; the continuing life of the living with all its complexity of work and leisure, suffering and delight, and knowledge of a certain future death.

The Mexican relationship with death may seem strange to the Westerner, but it is precisely because the Mexican respects death that he can, at the same time, mock it. The Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz describes the Mexican attitude best in The Labyrinth of Solitude:

The word death is not pronounced in New York, in Paris, in London, because it burns the lips. The Mexican, in contrast, is familiar with death, jokes about it, caresses it, sleeps with it, celebrates it; it is one of his favorite toys and his most steadfast love.

Besides the colorful decorations and sculptures, the Mexican attitude towards death is a healthy alternative to dealing with the subject. Perhaps viewing the dead as active participants in everyday life will add a sense of comfort to those who experience the loss of a loved one.

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