Memento Mori (2024)

Memento, Not Momento

The phrase is misspelled often enough that the error has its own search traffic. It is memento mori, from the Latin verb meaning to remember, and it translates as remember that you must die. A momento is something else entirely, a souvenir, and the slip is revealing: the two words describe opposite operations. A souvenir is an object that helps you hold on to something. A memento mori is an instruction to let go. Photography, awkwardly, is very good at both, which is why the genre keeps producing work that cannot decide whether it is mourning or collecting.

The Victorian Industry

The nineteenth century built a commercial apparatus around this subject that has no modern equivalent. Post-mortem portraiture was an ordinary service, memorial cards circulated as printed objects, and hair was set into jewellery as a physical index of a specific person. None of this was considered morbid. It was the reasonable response to high mortality and to a new technology that could, for the first time and at accessible cost, produce a durable likeness. The catalog for this exhibition includes a print made from a glass negative, which places a contemporary photographer inside that lineage at the level of process rather than reference.

The Short List of Available Symbols

The vocabulary of the genre is small and very old: the skull, the extinguished candle, the stopped clock, the cut flower. Flowers do the most work, because a bouquet is a mortality timer that the viewer can read without instruction. The problem is that the list is so well established that using it can substitute for thinking. A photograph of a skull announces its subject and then has to do something further, and the further thing is where the work either exists or does not.

The Permanence Paradox

This catalog includes a platinum print, which is worth pausing on. Platinum and palladium prints are among the most chemically stable photographic objects ever made, expected to outlast the papers they sit on and most of the buildings that house them. Choosing that process for a work about impermanence is either a contradiction or the sharpest available comment on one. The image insists that nothing lasts; the object is built to last several centuries. Every archival decision in a mortality exhibition carries some version of this tension, and the honest work tends to acknowledge it.

Photographing Absence Instead

The most effective contemporary strategy is usually indirect. Rather than depicting death, the photograph records what death left behind: the chair still angled toward the television, the coat on the hook, the garden continuing without supervision. This approach avoids the two failure modes of the genre, which are shock and sentimentality, by giving the viewer an ordinary object and letting the inference happen unassisted. It also tends to be truer to the experience it describes, since grief is mostly encountered in the form of household objects rather than in dramatic scenes.

Why the Theme Recurs

Mortality is the one subject with no possibility of resolution, which is precisely why it can be re-opened annually without exhausting itself. TCG Gallery is an independent online photography gallery, and each juried exhibition remains part of a permanent public archive after its run ends, so this catalog sits alongside the earlier edition of the theme and can be read against it. Photographers can enter the current photography open calls directly.