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From: Eva Category: Art Date: 02 April 2008 Time: 06:48 PM Review: http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/gallery/2008/mar/31/lifebeforedeath?picture=333325401 Currently the Guardian's 'most read'. I'm not surprised, you don't get many photos of dead people who did not die in such a way as to be covered in blood or soot or having had something horrific happen which twisted their bodies into all the 'wrong' angles - rather than death itself being responsible for the distortions. Violent images of death so readily accessible in the media are too familiar when they come from a war or earthquake story, unlikely to be printed if they are the result of some terrorism or aviation accident outside a war zone. Unlikely to be printed if the person depicted could be recognized, so there's some abstraction. This picture article is made up of silky black and white portraits of terminally ill people just before they died, and shortly after as corpses. And it's quite sentimental and it feels very 19th century, but I like it. I like looking at the people alive and then at their sunken eyes after they are dead. Eyes alive, now dead, alive again, dead again - metaphysical blinking via the 'back' and 'forward' buttons. I try to imagine all the people I know who died, all of whose bodies I never saw, and try to imagine their eyes shrunken and sunken just that extra bit all the way around. It makes me feel upset but at the same time I enjoy remembering them and wish I could have seen them dead. This makes me think of the Brothers Karamasov and the most memorable section in the book for me which involved the smell of decay from the priest that shattered the good brother's religious belief, or his belief in religion. The smell of dead people most of us only know through literature. Maybe that's not a bad thing. I don't know.