Perspective: These photos explore mysterious connections between life and death
From the moment I stumbled across his work on an acquaintance’s Instagram feed, I’ve been intrigued by the photography of Wouter Van de Voorde. The Belgian-born, Austalia-based artist’s work has something I can’t quite put my finger on that seems to hover over his ethereal black-and-white photographs.I had never seen his work in book form until just recently when I got ahold of his latest book, “” . And true to what I have seen in sporadic posts on Instagram, this is a book shrouded in mystery.
The photos in the book were made against the backdrop of the pandemic with its droves and droves of death. But at the same time, de Voorde was just about to welcome the birth of a second child. Inevitably, thoughts of life and death must have been crossing his mind. “Death is not here” not surprisingly turns out to be a meditation on those things, which are, after all, two of the biggest touchstones on this planet.
I think this book defies an easy, tidy reading. For me, that something that hovers over the work that I can’t put quite put my finger on is the thing that ties it all together. It is the mixture of mystery that happens when bringing together the various themes and situations in the book, from holes dug into the ground, to cairns made of stones and fossils, to an ongoing documentation of Australia’s ravens .
In a world being bombarded with tragedy and hardship, from the pandemic to the political crisis in the United States, to the war in Ukraine and to the ongoing threat of global erasure at the hands of a failing climate, a book like this is almost inevitable. And, truth be told, there are any number of books that have taken these big themes on. But de Voorde’s work is impeccably personal and, thus, intensely poetic.
It seems so contrary, but tragedy, death and loss can be so full of beauty. I suspect that is because they are all part of the tapestry of life, too. You can’t think about one without the other. To paraphrase St. Augustine, death is the privation of life.Taking in the totality of de Voorde’s work in “Death is not here,” you can see, and even feel, him tugging at the threads between life and its ineffable impermanence. And he does it in a singularly magnificent way.
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