Visual Research (2015)

This photograph emerged from an assignment in middle school art class. Directed to shoot a self-portrait of your ‘counterpart’, I set out to capture a life/death opposite. The interpretative freedom that this assignment allowed, led me to contemplate questions of self-identity and taboos surrounding death. The process that preceded this photo entailed both conceptual and visual experimentation. The setting of the photo was formed by the back wall of a cemetery in a small village in France. Here, the angular mountain in the background reveals a second cross, creating a fitting visual repetition with the cross on the gravestone in the foreground. Besides playing with all sorts of lines and angles, this photo plays with the uncanniness of one pictured dead but alive. Liveliness that becomes noticeable in details like a hand still able to hold up a dead ‘bouquet’ of thistles.  

© 2025 Myrthe Weijers