2012 Portfolio Review

Dust Unto Dust

A Visual Exploration into the Experience of Dying

These photographs implore thinking on the inevitable. Throughout my half century of involvement in photography I have often explored death as subject matter usually when photographing in cemeteries. I have on occasion photographed dead creatures, but those photographs were less personal, more detached, not allowing the photographs to become this uncomfortable.

On a visit to the beach at Bolivar I found the carcasses of an unusually large number of fish. These were not the trash fish that anglers toss on land to die. These were good sized fish washed ashore and stranded as if by some freak accident. I have no idea what caused this small disaster but with so many dead creatures in such close proximity it seemed an exceptional opportunity to photographically explore the subject of dying.

It would have been easy to walk on past, to avoid the stench, the repulsive sight of these unfortunate creatures. But I wanted to understand what the photographs would say about carrying the experience of dying to its final conclusion. I found more in the photographs than I ever expected.

I would be pleased if you found these photographs to be poetic. I do. I find them to be both terribly disturbing and unbelievably beautiful. They talk of a life lived as well as death. They talk of tragedy, fate, the inevitable‒the future of every living creature. They talk of the tenacity of life, the universal craving to cling to life even in the direst of circumstances.

When I look at these photographs I see in gaping mouths that last desperate gasp for life that each will someday make. In the twisted bodies, the throes of agony at unwillingly departing this flesh. In the vacant eye sockets our inability to see beyond that final moment. In the rotting, decomposing flesh, our fate…

...dust unto dust and under dust to lie.                                  ― Gary Woodard  2012