JANUARY 1, SATURDAY

THE LIVING DEAD

Soon after I began photographing in 1998 I discovered that a person that I had photographed was no longer alive.

I photographed the people in a village close to Mussoorie, India and was particularly struck by the presence of a grandmother sitting in a doorway. She was beautiful. Two years later when I brought a printed book of people living in the village to the village I was told she was no longer alive.

A couple of years later I saw three laughing children in a window in Varanasi and photographed them. When I brought the printed photographs back a day later to give to them I was invited in for dinner and sat with the family in their small one room home, shoulder to shoulder, six children and a mother and father who was a boatman who rowed pilgrims and tourists past the ghats, stone steps, of the Ganges River to Desasvamedh Ghat, the most holy ghat. He later gave me a ride on the river and I photographed him.

A couple of years later I brought a printed book of the photographs to the family and sat with them in their little room. They liked the book, but they greeted me with despair, not smiles. The boatman father had died six months before and they were in desperate financial condition with one child in the hospital and no money to pay for his care. I gave them $100 which has seemed stingier and stingier and stingier to me over the years. The next time I came to Assi Ghat, the window was empty, the family were gone.

Over the twenty years I have been photographing I have now taken hundreds of photographs of people who are now no longer alive. And slowly it has dawned on me that every photograph I take of a face is of a person who is only fleetingly here. Everyone is one of the living dead, alive now but soon gone. In the vast eons of time before our birth we didn‘t exist, in the vast stretch of time after our death we won‘t be here, we will be a photograph that will quickly fade. For a brief moment we amble around and smile and eat pizza and then we are gone, for good. All my photographs, including selfies, are a record of this brief moment of the dead while living, of us, the living dead.