I purchased this photograph (above) from Joy Hunsberger’s display at
the Philly Punk Rock Flea Market in December, 2015. Why, you may ask. I can’t
tell you, because I don’t always understand my motivations. I suppose I
purchased it to make an emotional and artistic connection to someone who ALSO
photographs dead animals. There, the truth is out – I photograph dead animals.
Have been, off and on, for ten or more years. And I don’t know why.
Joy’s rationale for photographing dead animals – roadkill,
specifically – was conveniently included in the clear plastic envelope behind
this beautiful 12x18 inch color photograph of the dead bunny. I was totally
intrigued by this “ROADKILL MANIFESTO,” which describes her thought process
over the course of “a decade of documenting roadkill.” Throughout this article,
I have included some of the animal images from her website. I’m also going to
use her manifesto as sort of an outline for this article.
After reading Joy’s manifesto and later interviewing her, I
may be a bit closer to understanding my own motivations. (It took me ten years,
by the way, to be able to answer the question of why I make photographs in
cemeteries. The reason? To get closer to death, to come to terms with my own
mortality and to soften the blow when loved ones die – I think.) So what is
Joy’s motivation? Get closer to death? Become more in tune with her mortality?
No she says, she’s always had a clear understanding of that. She photographs
dead animals as a way of defining her - and their - place in nature. She sees
animals as her relatives - our relatives – beings that deserve our respect. Perhaps
one reason she feels so grounded in this idea is because she views animals as
very clearly part of our extended family. The fact that she personally has very
few blood relatives may have influenced her thought process.
(Bold Quotes are from
Joy Hunsberger’s ROADKILL MANIFESTO:)
“A lot of people
don't understand my art. They think I'm trying to shock people, or that I'm
romanticizing death or dark ideals. None of these is the case. My work is
actually a very deep, ancient conversation. My obsession with taking pictures
of roadkill is rather complex.
In its simplest form,
it is a deeply spiritual ritual that pays homage to our four-legged ancestors,
a practice in compassion, and also a raw energetic connection to the natural
world. It also assumes a more complex vantage point as a critical dissection of
our/my place in the current world, and an apology for our/my disruptive
influence upon it.”
Many people would rather not look at images of dead animals,
but I, for one, am strangely compelled to observe roadkill. I am also compelled
to photograph it ... them?
I never really
thought about why this is. Joy has conjectured that people are turned off by
these visual reminders of death for a number of reasons. For one, it is because
it reminds us of our own mortality. In addition, I believe, because it also makes us feel guilty for killing them.
Does Joy go out looking for roadkill? No, she says, she always
just happens on it. Such occurrences are fairly common in the suburbs, she
states. Based on my own experiences, it is not an altogether safe practice to
be running out into traffic to photograph a dead raccoon or deer. Again, I
don’t fully understand why I do it. Maybe this could be part of the reason:
“Hovering over these
precious vessels that once held life, shining a light in the dark, I have
slowly been transforming my camera into a shamanic tool all these years. In
many ways, my work creates opportunities for transformation for both the
deceased and also for the viewer, and raises further questions about the
separation and integration of art, life cycles, and spirituality, from one
another. All of life is a delicate balance, with our time in this realm
balanced by our passing from it.
As a society, we fear
death because we do not fully understand it, but even more so because we cannot
control it. This is an imbalanced view. Current societal ideals state that we
must control as much as possible, shunning any symbiotic relationship with
nature, any ideas of impermanence, and anything that is not immediately
gratifying to the ego, in favor of the illusion of security, born from control.
This upsets the balance of life.”
The preceding paragraph may sound familiar, if you read my
January 3, 2016 blog post, “
The Death Salon.” What Joy writes is in accord with
what Caitlin Doughty, founder of
Death Salon and
The Order of the Good Death tells
people. “
The Order of the Good Death is a group of funeral industry professionals,
academics, and artists exploring ways to prepare a death phobic culture for
their inevitable mortality … [it] is about making death a part of your life…
accepting that death itself is natural, but the death anxiety and terror of
modern culture are not.”
- (http://www.orderofthegooddeath.com/about)
“In truth, anything that we cannot control
becomes almost morally unacceptable, eventually becoming intolerable. In our
casual conversations, we tend to shy away from any prolonged observation of our
mortality, as it is considered distasteful, vulgar, and sometimes dangerous.
The topic of mortality is generally considered to be uncomfortable in the
current culture as a whole, and as such, is even sometimes used as a means to
steer public opinion.”
From the
Death Salon website:
“
Death is sanitized and hidden in
contemporary culture to the point of becoming a taboo subject. We aim to
subvert this death denial by opening up conversations with the public about
death and its anthropological, historical, and artistic contributions to
culture” (
http://deathsalon.org/). This
makes me think of how popular the Mexican Day of the Dead has become in
non-Mexican culture. Do all these people appreciate the meaning behind
DÃa de
Muertos or is it just a good excuse for a party while wearing skull-design
fashions?
Joy thought it ironic that the punk rock girls at the Philly
Punk Rock Flea Market with all their skull-and-crossbones clothing appeared
rather squeamish and shied away from her large photographic display of death. Reactions
to her work vary. She came across a customer in a bar once where she was one of
several artists who had their work set up to sell. The person - a fine arts
painter - was drawn to her work but did not understand why. He told her, “I
can’t stop looking at your work, it will haunt me if I don’t buy it.” Finally,
he had to make the decision with the money that remained in his pocket – buy
that last drink or buy one of Joy’s photographs. He opted for the latter,
stating that he did not understand why, but he had to own it. I may have a clue
as to why he felt that way.
Something I’ve noticed in doing research to help people find their ancestors’ graves at (the formerly
abandoned) Mount Moriah Cemetery in Philadelphia, is that many people need a
tangible link to their past. They need to feel a greater connection to their
human family. Might this be part of the reason people are drawn to Joy’s
photographs? A subconscious kindred association with these animals? A need to
include them as part of a larger family?
If the images in this article speak to you in some way, and you need to
have a deeper association with them, please visit Joy Hunsberger’s website to view
many more examples. You may see something that speaks to you, something that
urges you to have a deeper conversation with yourself about man’s place in the
“hierarchy” of the animal kingdom. All 12 x 18 inch color photographs are available for purchase by contacting Joy at joy@joyh.com
When I first walked up to Joy’s large exhibit and realized
what the subject matter was, I immediately wondered about people’s reactions to
her images. People react to my own cemetery photography in certain ways, but my
work is more about abstract death - Joy’s is graphic and real. Observers may behave
one way, yet cannot, or will not allow themselves to verbalize (or even
understand) what it is that deep down really bothers them about her roadkill
photographs.
“In the end, people
seem to be afraid to think of their bodies as merely temporary arrangements of
atoms which house an eternal life-force. They are attached to their limited,
constructed ways of thinking, and any change scares them. For this reason, my
work is often not well-received.”
I wonder if people are better able to accept the death of an
animal if it appears peaceful, versus one that has suffered a tragic,
blood-spattered demise? I wonder if the people that react most violently to Joy’s
work are those steeped in the denial of their own mortality? I wonder if
they’re the kind of people who buy way more books than they could ever possibly
read due to the subconscious belief that if there are books to be read, their
lives will be extended to allow that to occur.
What are Joy Hunsberger’s own reactions to seeing dead
animals in person? She told me that she does not know why she started making such
photographs, but she has learned to appreciate the beauty of these animals from her close vantage point. For instance, she was
astounded by the sheer size of a roadkilled elk hit by a tractor trailer. “Four people could have sat on its back, each
of it’s hooves was a big as my head.”
My own reaction to roadkill has changed since seeing Joy’s
work and reading her Manifesto. This winter, I stopped by the side of the road
to photograph a dead white-tailed deer in northern New Jersey. I was fascinated
by the dead gray, pupil-less eyes and the doe’s long, snow-frosted eyelashes,
details I had never looked for in the past.
When Edward S. Curtis photographed Native Americans in the
late 1800s, he no doubt grew to appreciate the detail his subjects had to offer.
His goal was to photograph and document as much of Native American life as
possible before that way of life disappeared. Ironically, it was to disappear
because of the White Man’s presence. Our ancestors, the European settlers,
mowed down the indigenous people on the North American continent much the same
way as we now mow down animals on our highways, except the latter have even
less of a say. Progress and capitalism, damn anyone or anything that gets in
our way.
"Many artists create
idyllic imagery of beautiful moments and pleasing aesthetics. This has its
place, and serves its purpose. However, we understand from experience that
desiring for things to ALWAYS be easy, happy and controllable (comfortable) is
unrealistic, unbalanced, and unnatural. It affords no opportunity for growth or
reflection, and therefore circumvents the very root of compassion, empathy and
resilience."
That last statement reminds me of my own desire to
photograph crumbling, gothic cemetery angels rather than the pristine, unblemished
white marble ones. I suppose I see the worn ones as more “realistic,” less
idyllic. Most people like to view the world through rose-colored glasses.
I choose to spend a lot of my time around dead things – I have
been doing cemetery photography for about fifteen years and have written about
my experiences in my weekly
Cemetery Traveler blog for the past five years. The
more time you spend around dead things, the more you realize that you cannot
avoid the inevitable. Once you realize that certain things are beyond your
control, perhaps you can
instead
focus on bringing more beauty and understanding into the world while you occupy
a place in it.
“This expectation of
ease has become a silent agreement in society that makes us manic, mentally
unstable, sick, oppressed and depressed. It turns us into control freaks to the
point that we ignore our own ethics and the balance required of life, and
actually pushes us towards death even faster at an unnatural pace.
Our current
practices in consumption, gratification, and apathy are unbalanced and
destructive. However, their nature has been aesthetically transformed by a
social agreement to focus solely on their pleasurable, attractive short-term
attributes as if only they existed. This way of thinking acts as a social
lubricant, binding us together in a common mindset, but in reality, the
long-term effects of this type of denial quietly rob us of our souls, break
down our bodies, and weaken our minds.
It leads us to make
unconscious choices that we might not sanction with our conscious minds. For
example, currently in suburban culture, many people need to drive to get to
their jobs. Driving = job = money = food & shelter. Without food &
shelter we would die.
The short equation
is: Driving = Life and its counterpart,
Not Driving = Death.”
Why is it bothersome to us when we are reminded that we kill
animals with our motor vehicles? Is it the guilt that we feel as a result of
the killing or the fact that we cannot totally control our environment? Joy
believes that the capitalist vision of our interaction with nature does not allow
us to confront the reality that we, like roadkill, will eventually come to the
end of our lives.
She tells me that today [Western] society is death-phobic or
suffering-phobic – we avoid anything related to suffering or death. She
believes that if we accepted death for the natural place it has in our lives, we
would all make more rational decisions. Inevitable death should be, she
believes, a reminder for us to make the most of our time on earth. Death is the
punctuation mark, she states, the period at the end of our life’s sentence. With
this way of thinking, our challenge, I suppose, is to complete the sentence as
best we can.
Is this abhorrence of
death learned or innate? Joy relates the story of an eight-year-old boy who ran
up to her display of dead animal photographs and expressed shock at what he
saw. In her calm, soothing voice, she said “You don’t have to be afraid, they
can’t hurt you. They’re dead.” “Oh,” said the young boy, and his demeanor
changed. Kids in general usually have less of an issue with her work.
"So many people drive
each day in order to "avoid death" that there are traffic jams and
accidents. They are willing to play the odds of taking the life of an animal, a
human, or even themselves, in order to try to circumvent a more probable
demise, given the above equation.
What this boils down
to is that those people are willing to swap the (perceived) more probable,
eventual risk of losing their own lives, with the (perceived) less probable,
more immediate risk of taking another’s life.
In this way, roadkill
has become an unconscious form of proxy. When we see an animal in the street,
most people do not think about this substitution, or recognize them for the
sacrifices that they truly are."
This brings the idea of value to the fore – is the life of a
common housecat more valuable than the life of an elk? Since we are more
closely connected to domesticated animals like cats and dogs, do we place
greater value on
their lives?
Why is the
life of a deer less valued than the life of Cecil the lion (
http://cecilthelion.org/)?
We assign values to different lives – human lives included. Joy’s opinion is
that all life matters. The more she studies roadkill, the better she understands
the idea of the end of our own human existence. We should plan a “good death,” she
believes, a preparation for the end through, dare I say, enlightenment? How can
the average person reach a place of equanimity about dying?
The writer Jiddu Krishnamurti (regarded as one of the
greatest philosophical and spiritual figures of the twentieth century) said:
“Most of us have fear in one form or another; and where
there is fear there is no intelligence. … Do you know what intelligence is? It
is the capacity, surely, to think freely, without fear, without a formula, so
that you begin to discover for yourself what is real, what is true; but if you
are frightened you will never be intelligent.”
- From the book, Think On These Things
As a way of helping us make a personal connection to the
animals she photographs, Joy Hunsberger, the artist/interpreter, gives proper NAMES
to her subjects. For example, “Homer” the opossum, and “Eden” the deer. If you
look at her website (
http://joyh.com/), you’ll see this. I have captioned her
photographs in this article with the names she gave these deceased animals. I
find this naming process fascinating. I asked her about it and she feels it is
a way to put the animals on an equal footing with us, to help us make a cerebral
connection with them.
I thought about Mark Twain’s
The Diaries of Adam and
Eve, and how he wrote that it was Eve who gave names to all the animals.
Adam was confounded by the whole process. In Twain's description of Eve, she is the
one truly engaged in this glimpse into Eden. Eve is fully engaged in the
life process - the thinker, seeker, the emotionally active being. It is no
wonder that it is Eve who names the animals (and discovers fire, by the way), while Adam sits
in a tree and complains, “
I wish it would not talk. It is always talking.”
Twain's Eve states at one point, “
I have taken all the work of naming things off his hands, and this has
been a great relief to him, for he has not gift in that line, and is evidently
very grateful.” Eventually, Adam comes to appreciate her wisdom. After she
dies, Adam says, “
Wheresoever she was,
there was Eden.”
My friend Frank, who works at Laurel Hill, called me saying
“It’s a winter wonderland up here!” This confirmed my suspicions that I was
making a worthwhile run. The cemetery is about eight miles from where I live,
and takes about forty minutes to drive there. 
