In Sickness Until Death Color photographs in commercially produced wedding album, cyanotype photographs, orange fabric, love seat, painted coffee table 10” x 10” book, variable sized installation 2018-Ongoing
I began photographing my mother regularly when I moved to Columbus, Ohio. She lived about an hour south, but all of her doctors were in the “big city.” I was able to learn about my mom’s chronic illnesses by being physically closer and photographing her. I began by photographing her in her home, then by accompanying my parents on my mother’s numerous doctor visits. The appointments more frequently became visits to the emergency room, and then short stays in the hospital. And then my dad was diagnosed with stage-four pancreatic cancer.
Photographer Nan Goldin’s well-known body of work, The Ballad of Sexual Dependency is an accumulation of over five years of slides she made of her friends and family. In an interview for the BBC (The Genius of Photography: We Are Family, BBC Four. November 20, 2007. S01 E05) she said, “Photography has actually saved my life many times. I have walked through many things I am afraid of by photographing them. Literally. Photography has enabled me to never lose anyone, or so I thought. And then, when my best friend died in 1989, [. . .] I realized that I really had lost her, no matter how many pictures I had of her, and photography had failed me because it doesn’t do what I thought it would do at the beginning, which is save people’s lives.”
Her family, friends, and lovers were her subjects. My mother and father were also a willing participants in the images I made of them. My mom would tell people, “Shelly loves to take pictures of me when I look my worst!” Yet while driving to every appointment she would give me a call to make sure I had a chance to meet her at the doctor’s office for photographs. Was this determination to photograph my parents in their rapid decline an attempt to hold on to them forever, or was it a way of saving myself, of walking through something I feared and removing myself from the very thing I was making permanent through the processes of photographic capture? Perhaps I simply want to tell the story, our story.
My life is filled with family stories. I know details about people in my family from generations ago. All of the stories seem to begin with marriage and having a family. This social institution has structured my family for hundreds of years. When it comes to death, however, I have only statements. Are we afraid of the exhaustion of stories of death, of the pain, of the smell? Are we too polite to mention it? Isn’t it too, worth remembering? In this album, I offer you a story in pictures; the tale of the death of my parents, with all of the details of how they lived out the words, “In sickness and in health, until by death we part.”
Like much of my work, this piece was made in the thick of a very intense period of my life. It began as a reflection on the social institutions of marriage and family. As time has moved on, this piece has also become a reflection on grief. The installation grows, molds, reshapes, yet the pictures remain stagnant since no new memories with my parents are being captured. Below are installation images of how the work has changed over the years.
