You write the reviews: Life Before Death, Wellcome Collection, London
Monday, 5 May 2008
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Next to a photograph of Wolfgang Katzahn, a subject in this show at the Wellcome Collection in London, is the quotation: "Suddenly, everything matters. I have never paid any attention to clouds before." In the next picture, his days of sky-gazing are over: he's dead.
The photographer Walter Schels and his partner, the journalist Beate Lakotta, spent a year in hospices in Germany with 24 terminally ill people who had agreed to have their last days recorded. Life Before Death is the resulting exhibition.
Each patient is the subject of two one-meter-square portraits. One was shot in the weeks before death, the other in the hours afterwards. They are positioned on the gallery wall at a height of a mantelpiece mirror, so the viewer stares life and death in the face. The size of the photographs is appropriate: there are three patients who have beards, and it is possible to discern death in their facial hair. Each patient also has a mini-biography.
As you walk around the appropriately black-and-white gallery, it is the combination of words and images that lends this powerful exhibition its greatest impact. An advertising executive with a brain tumour appears intense, as if he is annoyed that his visitors do not see the inadvertent irony of their farewell comment: "Hope you're soon back on track, mate."
The knowledge of the ultimate destination causes one patient to declare: "I embrace death"; she yearns for total detachment before the end. Another man rages: "Don't they get it? I'm going to die!" Reading the words and gazing at the photographs, it would be impossible to misplace the face with the quotation.
Although fear is common throughout, so is hope, beauty and peace. Particularly prevalent is the impulse that causes one patient to declare: "I'd rather put up with pain than lose control." It is there when a lady lines up dolls in a way that evokes her home and when a man records the results of Hamburg SV football club on a wall chart.
The need to assert a particle of personality is most poignant when a woman mentions that her husband is a tyrant. He refuses to let her die at home because he can't cope. She enters the hospice and spends three weeks in bed drinking champagne before agreeing to see him. They spend the evening locked in conversation. She dies the next morning.
You leave the gallery and step out on to Euston Road pleased, that if the sky is grey, at least it is not black-and-white. As one contributor to the visitors' book puts it: "Right, I'm off to Tahiti."
To 18 May (020-7611 2222; www.wellcomecollection.org)
David Fitzgerald, professional poker player, London
