Illness, Female, 60 years old, 2010, by Sarah Sudhoff
It's not uncommon for photographs of starving children, LOLcats, and New Yorker Cartoons to appear unpunctuated in the same glance at my Tumblr dashboard. As internet users, we are bombarded with images in a way that is hyper-stimulating, contextless, and constant. Discussions about desensitization to powerful images of war or violence come as no surprise. What does take me by surprise is when an image makes me flinch.
I hadn't even had my morning coffee when, reviewing recent entries, I came across this dark and visceral series by contender Sarah Sudhoff. The images—closeups of stains from gun shots, illness and other lingering forms of death—are abstract, but I found myself needing to look away more than once as I browsed through.
Suicide with Gun, Male, 40 years old, 2010 by Sarah Sudhoff
I'm not necessarily a believer that provoking a strong reaction necessarily makes an artwork good (it's a really tricky question), but it does reveal something unqiue about how the viewer deals with difficult images. Sarah's series, At the Hour of Our Death, tells each viewer something about their own attitudes towards death.
Sarah writes:
Death, like birth, is part of a process. However, the processes of death are often shielded from view. Today in Western society most families leave to a complete stranger the responsibility of preparing a loved one's body for its final resting place. Traditional mourning practices, which allowed for the creation of Victorian hair jewelry or other memento mori items, have fallen out of fashion. Now the stain of death is quickly removed and the scene is cleaned and normalized. As Phillipe Aries writes, "Society no longer observes a pause; the disappearance of an individual no longer affects its continuity".
From a purely visual standpoint, the images from are beautiful—and colorful.
I'm reminded of Jason Lazarus's Heinecken Studies, a series of colorful photograms made from scattering the cremated remains of Robert Heinecken over photo paper.
To be affected by Sarah's images while simultaneously questioning their authenticity is inescapable. Famous photographers like Taryn Simon seem to slip into private—or highly guarded—spaces time-and-time-again, but how does someone like Sarah access these ephemeral spaces and their undoubtedly sensitive information? In her statement, she addresses some (but not all) of these personal and technical details.
Sarah writes:
At the age of seventeen, I lost a friend to suicide. While visiting his home the day after the event, I witnessed a clean-up crew steam cleaning the carpet in his bedroom. All physical traces of the past 24 hours had vanished.
These large-scale color photographs capture and fully illuminate swatches of bedding, carpet and upholstery marked with the signs of the passing of human life. The fabrics which are first removed by a trauma scene clean up crew, are relocated to a warehouse before being incinerated. I tack each swatch to the wall and use the crew's floodlights to illuminate the scene. The images are my attempt to slow the moments before and after death to a single frame, to allow what is generally invisible to become visible, and to engage with a process from which we have become disconnected.
I believe in Sudhoff's images, just like I believe in Simon's images and Lazarus's images, but in this case it's not the story, but the sickly stained photographs themselves that I responded to. You can visit Sarah's website to view several more intense bodies of work focusing on "making visible what societal conventions render invisible."