Here is an interesting and troubling question: what can photography say about dying?
We can, without question, give photographic testimony to death by violence or the many forms of bigotry by the ignorance and stupidity that humans often demonstrate. We can document the selfishness and, in doing so, create an argument for peace.
“Memento Morrie” by Heather Pillar
Published by Daylight Books, 2024
Review by W. Scott Olsen
But what about dying in its more commonplace form? We all get there eventually, yet it is one truth we spend most of our lives ignoring or denying. Perhaps Dylan Thomas’s villanelle got it right, we think: “Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
It’s likely we only get one shot at this, and while we may rage we also deny. But every now and then, something comes along that reminds us there is another possible response: Acceptance and love, a reach toward wisdom.
Back in 1997, a simple book had a global effect. Tuesdays with Morrie was a series of interviews with Morrie Schwartz, a Brandeis University sociology professor, written by Mitch Albom. Schwartz was dying from ALS. The book was uplifting and accepting, and among other attributes, it was simply wise and filled with love. Schwartz was bright and articulate and generous. The world took hope from his way of looking at the world.
The opposite of rage, it seems, is not surrender. The opposite of rage is acceptance and, with any luck, an understanding.
On my desk today is a book called Memento Morrie: Images of Love and Loss, by Heather Pillar. Pillar was a graduate student and a university photographer at Brandeis at the time and got to know Schwartz and his family well before Albom’s book came out. Memento Morrie is a photo documentary of the last months of Schwartz’s life.
The book is divided into several sections with titles like Building a Caring Community, Friends, Family, Caregiving, Spirituality, In Death and Beyond. There are guest essays by Rob Schwartz (Morrie’s son), Doctor Stanley Appel, Richard Harris, and Anita Hannig. The images are arranged not to demonstrate a chronology, not the ongoing wasting of a body, so much as to give evidence to a mindset, to a way of looking at the end of one’s time on Earth.
The black and white images are documentary in style, and each one is an illumination of a nuanced emotion. They are filled with love and affection, filled with friends and embracing.
According to Rob Schwartz in an introduction called “Unadorned Moments,”
But, back to the spring of 1995 before the media attention, Heather had the wonderful thought to document what my dad was going through. She got the idea from Maury Stein’s course where he talked about his dear friend and opening up about death and dying. With some negotiation, Dad agreed to Heather photographing his last six months of life. The images were paired with my dad’s aphorisms and exhibited at Brandeis in late September 1995 as part of the terms of negotiation. Dad had little inkling they would become such a visual reference, for years to come, of him and his illness…
…This openness and generosity of spirit is captured superbly in these images. The photographer was invited into intimate, unadorned moments, such as my dad getting massaged and spending affectionate times with the family. The sensitivity of the photographer, as well as her ability to seize “the decisive moment” (to quote Henry Cartier-Bresson) in composition, is evident in these perceptive portraits.
Throughout the book, there are occasional captions which explain who is in the image, what the situation may be. And there are aphorisms, little bits of wit, which reveal a great deal about Schwartz’s personality. For example, at the beginning of the section called Caregiving we read,
In the beginning of life, when we are infants, we need others to survive. And at the end of life, we need others to survive. But here’s the secret: in between, we need others as well.
With a book like this, it’s easy to forget the talent of the photographer. We get caught up in the story. We get caught up in the ideas of loss and love and spend time staring at the ceiling, wondering what our own forthcoming event might look like. Documentary photography, at its very best, should not call attention to itself too often as a technique of light and line. But that does not mean the talent isn’t there—it means the art has made the artifice invisible.
These images give evidence of extraordinary access, not only to the physical presence of someone who is approaching death, but extraordinary access to an understanding of how a human face or embrace may speak volumes to the observer.
If photographs are intimations of human emotion, then these images pack tremendous volume. It’s been 28 years since Tuesdays with Morrie, yet that book lingers in the cultural capital of this planet. Disease notwithstanding, if it is possible to aspire to a type of death, here is our example. To bring this photobook out now is a wonderful reaffirmation of the lessons Morrie Schwartz taught us, seen through the eye of a talented and insightful photographer.
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Heather Pillar
December 19, 2024 at 17:10
So grateful to W. Scott Olson for this beautiful review of ‘Memento Morrie.’ I was honored to photograph Morrie in 1995 and honored to make ‘Memento Morrie’ to add to the necessary conversations we should be having about life and death matters.