Fotografie: James "La Smoothe" Patterson Jr. (aus der Serie "The Travelers", Elizabeth Heyert)

Beschreibung

Das Foto zeigt eine Post-mortem-Aufnahme von James "La Smoothe" Patterson Jr., Born: September 1966; New York, New York; Died: February 2004, Harlem, New York; der Tote trägt ein gelbes Trikot der Basketball-Manschaft "LAKERS / 8" (Aufschrift), passend dazu ein entsprechendes Stirnband und eine Baseballkappe; seine Hände sind in die Hosentaschen geschoben. Das Foto stammt aus der Serie "The Travelers" von Elizabeth Heyert und erschien in der gleichnamigen Publikation 2006. Aus dem Katalog: "In 2003/2004 Elizabeth Heyert photographed the bodies of more than thirty people at a funeral home in Harlem, New York, where they prepared the corpses for their last journey. She would take photos early in the morning, with the family's permission, after they had said goodbye to their loved ones the previous evening and before the service later in the morning. The photographs are a unique contribution to contemporary portrait photography. They are movingly intimate but never sensationalist. Heyert explains: 'After I lost my parents, who died unexpectedly within three months of each other, I wanted to explore what it means for our humanity to suddenly vanish. My idea was to create portraits using the techniques I would use with a living subject, with beautiful lighting and characteristic poses, to show a real human being who had died, not merely create a record of a corpse. With The Travelers I was aware that I was photographing a community from the past, a vanishing piece of American cultural history. Many of the people here left a brutal life in the Depression-era South of the US to move to Harlem, New York, where the southern religious traditions were reestablished. Younger people were born and died in Harlem, but were still buried according to the old style, dressed for celebrating the Afterlife, but in sharp tracksuits instead of burial gowns. Now, twenty years later, these traditions have all but faded. I hope my photographs reflect, like all good portraits, the humanity of each of my subjects, and tell some small part of the story of a passing generation and their way of death.'"