Next to a photograph of Wolfgang Kotzhahn, a subject in an exhibition at the Wellcome Collection, London, is his quotation: ‘Suddenly everything matters. I have never paid any attention to clouds before.’ In the next picture, his days of sky-gazing are over: he is dead.
Photographer Walter Schels and his partner, journalist Beate Lakotta, spent a year in hospices in Germany with 24 terminally ill people who had agreed to have their last days recorded: ‘Life Before Death’ is the resulting exhibition.
Each patient is the subject of two, one-meter square portraits; one was shot in the weeks before death, the other in the hours afterwards. They are positioned on the gallery wall at a height of a mantelpiece mirror so the viewer stares life and death in the face. The size of the photographs is appropriate: there are three patients with a beard and it is possible to discern death in their facial hair. Each patient also has a mini biography.
As you walk around the appropriately black and white gallery, it is the combination of words and images that lends this powerful exhibition its greatest impact. An advertising executive with a brain tumour appears intense, as if he is annoyed that his visitors do not see the inadvertent irony of their farewell comment: ‘Hope you’re soon back on track, mate.’
The knowledge of the ultimate destination causes another patient to declare ‘I embrace death’ and she yearns for total detachment before the end. Another man rages ‘Don’t they get it? I’m going to die!’ Reading the words and gazing at the accompanying photographs, it would be impossible to misplace the faces with the quotations.
Although fear is common throughout, so is hope, so is beauty, so is peace. Particularly prevalent is the impulse that causes one patient to declare ‘I’d rather put up with pain that lose control.’ It is a common impulse: it is there when a lady lines up dolls in a way that evokes her home and when a man records the results of Hamburg HSV on a wall chart.
The need to assert a particle of personality is most poignant when a woman mentions her husband is a tyrant. He refuses to let her die at home because he can’t cope. She enters the hospice, spends three weeks in bed drinking champagne cups, before agreeing to see him. They spend the evening locked in conversation. The next morning, she dies.
It was not possible for Schels to obtain a portrait of the last patient after her death. She was a 30 year old mother, who resisted her end until she had attended the funeral of her six year old son. However, after viewing 23 patients and exploring the whole of your emotions, you no longer need an image.
You leave the gallery and open the door to Euston Road pleased, even if the sky is grey, that at least it is not black and white. As one contributor to the visitors’ book puts it, ‘Right, I’m off to Tahiti.’
Live Before Death – Wellcome Collection, London until 18th May
Photographer Walter Schels and his partner, journalist Beate Lakotta, spent a year in hospices in Germany with 24 terminally ill people who had agreed to have their last days recorded: ‘Life Before Death’ is the resulting exhibition.
Each patient is the subject of two, one-meter square portraits; one was shot in the weeks before death, the other in the hours afterwards. They are positioned on the gallery wall at a height of a mantelpiece mirror so the viewer stares life and death in the face. The size of the photographs is appropriate: there are three patients with a beard and it is possible to discern death in their facial hair. Each patient also has a mini biography.
As you walk around the appropriately black and white gallery, it is the combination of words and images that lends this powerful exhibition its greatest impact. An advertising executive with a brain tumour appears intense, as if he is annoyed that his visitors do not see the inadvertent irony of their farewell comment: ‘Hope you’re soon back on track, mate.’
The knowledge of the ultimate destination causes another patient to declare ‘I embrace death’ and she yearns for total detachment before the end. Another man rages ‘Don’t they get it? I’m going to die!’ Reading the words and gazing at the accompanying photographs, it would be impossible to misplace the faces with the quotations.
Although fear is common throughout, so is hope, so is beauty, so is peace. Particularly prevalent is the impulse that causes one patient to declare ‘I’d rather put up with pain that lose control.’ It is a common impulse: it is there when a lady lines up dolls in a way that evokes her home and when a man records the results of Hamburg HSV on a wall chart.
The need to assert a particle of personality is most poignant when a woman mentions her husband is a tyrant. He refuses to let her die at home because he can’t cope. She enters the hospice, spends three weeks in bed drinking champagne cups, before agreeing to see him. They spend the evening locked in conversation. The next morning, she dies.
It was not possible for Schels to obtain a portrait of the last patient after her death. She was a 30 year old mother, who resisted her end until she had attended the funeral of her six year old son. However, after viewing 23 patients and exploring the whole of your emotions, you no longer need an image.
You leave the gallery and open the door to Euston Road pleased, even if the sky is grey, that at least it is not black and white. As one contributor to the visitors’ book puts it, ‘Right, I’m off to Tahiti.’
Live Before Death – Wellcome Collection, London until 18th May
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