Mortes presents Diana Michener’s reflections on the mystery of death. In three visual chapters focused on different themes, Michener explores her complex relationship to her subject: one of terror and wonder, of scientific fact and the inexplicable, of reverence and acceptance. The first chapter “Heads” shows the heads of cows slaughtered at an abattoir. Fascinated by the ambivalent relationship between the body and spirit, Michener records the intense moment of death. In “Foetus” she documents a collection of deformed nineteenth-century foetuses preserved in formaldehyde in glass jars, capturing what she calls “a terrible beauty in their silence and stillness.” In the final and most confronting chapter “Corpus,” Michener turns her lens upon us, photographing human corpses during autopsy. She touches on our unease with the brute physicality of death while conveying her admiration for the human body as a magnificent construct, as impressive in life as in death.

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