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Book published on first 50 photographers
November 2, 2011

Some deaths happen all at once. Bang, crash, screech, kaboom—you’re history, transformed from present tense to past. Other deaths linger, for days, weeks, years, always imminent and immanent, denying a body’s future while withholding final action. But death’s ultimate switch-flicking is universal and irrevocable.

In her series “At the Hour of Our Death” Sarah Sudhoff depicts the last moments of anonymous lives, when particular bodies have ceased functioning and have expressed their last, vivid traces. Sheets, mattress pads, upholstery, carpet, and other canvases chart the distance this effluent travels in the time elapsed after death.

True, these are morbid images, though their fascination resides in the liveliness of our mortal selves, the last interactions we extend, by capillary action, into the place of our passing. Sudhoff captures material shadows, or auras, that remain after a body is removed. In the present case, ornate cutwork embroidery contains the boundary of a middle-aged woman, the victim of an unnamed malady. The testament is authentic and evocative. Death and the passage of postmortem time transform the fabric into a final snapshot of this life. The lower, unmarked section is pristine, a blank slate, a dainty future never attained, while the upper half, traversed by any number of fluids, becomes oddly, ironically robust, the stitching assuming new organic forms that resemble cells, sinews, human tissue or neural networks seen in a microscope.

Many questions reside in this image of an image, but those are for the CSI types to consider. Sudhoff’s record is a life’s calling card, full of tragedy, intrigue, and surprising beauty.

—George Slade, re:photographica, independent curator and consultant, Minneapolis,
Minnesota

Texas Observer
Eye on Texas
May 6, 2011

Memento Mori
Amy Elkins
May 4, 2011

All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt. — Susan Sontag

Memento mori is a Latin phrase translated as “Remember your mortality.” While some may reflect on this only in the grim light of death, the phrase also speaks of impermanence and the fluctuation of our daily existence, poetics of both the profound and the ordinary.

The works of these four female photographers explore their innate desire to pull away from the external world – individually creating isolated, specific, and personal reflections on family, mortality, identity, and heightened moments of transition or uncertainty. While all four are approaching their work in distinct ways, each is directing us to a profound stillness, a sense of memento mori, all the while setting a personal stage in which fiction and reality mesh for the viewer.

Roberta Ruocco’s portraits of pre-pubescent adolescents speak of an exploration in identity crisis and role-play. Using full hair and makeup to create projected identities, these photographs transform girls ages 10-14 into older versions of themselves. The resulting portraits are beautiful, isolating, and unsettling.

Sarah Sudhoff’s large-scale color photographs from the series At The Hour Of Our Death capture swatches of bedding, carpet, and upholstery soiled and stained by the passing of human life. Through close up photographs of these traumas, Sudhoff presents haunting, alluring, and abstract reflections of mortality that would otherwise go unseen.

In the series Vanitas, Justine Reyes also examines mortality while additionally exploring identity and nostalgia within still life images that pair her grandmother’s belongings with her own. In her words, “The decomposition of the natural (rotting fruit and wilting flowers) and the break down of the man-made objects, reference the physical body, life’s impermanence and the inevitability of death." All images were shot with a 4×5 and 8×10 view camera and draw inspiration from Dutch Vanitas paintings.

Caitlin Teal Price photographs women transfixed in ordinary, yet daunting urban landscapes. By staging these moments, Price allows the viewer to create their own narrative about circumstance, mortality, uncertainty, and the identity of these women. The resulting images create both tension and ambiguity about what the future holds for these women.

Wired.com
Pete Brook
March 1, 2011

When we think about death not many of us consider the actual gunk that bodies leave behind — the fluids and gases of decomposition. In the case of murder, suicide or unexpectedly fatal illness, things are not likely to be pleasant or tidy.

Sarah Sudhoff takes portraits of these messes. She shoots swatches of material collected at death-site cleanups in a series called At the Hour of Our Death.

“My intention with the images is not to be shocking or gory,” says Sudhoff. “I can understand how some people might see them as being so; especially those who have never witnessed a severe injury or illness or the death of a loved one.”

Originally Sudhoff planned to photograph scenes of death before and after the work of cleanup crews “juxtaposing the event with the absence of the event” but she was roundly ignored by the companies she contacted. The project took a new direction after Sudhoff met a clean-up crew returning with material from the scene of a suicide.

“I was shown an oval shaped section of mattress which had been removed,” says Sudhoff. “Visually these smaller, concentrated fragments of evidence grabbed my attention. The stains from this person’s passing transformed the ordinary beige mattress into beautiful hues of yellow and red.”

There’s a good chance Sarah Sudhoff has thought a little more about death than the average thirty-something. In 2004, she went through treatment for cervical cancer. In her series that followed, titled Repository (NSFW), Sudhoff viscerally photographs hospitals, morgues and medical museums with herself as a model.

“My experiences with illness and death are not out of the ordinary,” says Sudhoff. “However, my understanding of my own mortality and those of my loved ones has been by effected by experiencing different manners in which people can and do die.”

Without chemical intervention, dead bodies degrade rapidly. When a human heart stops, gravity pulls blood to the lowest points of the body, skin adopts a chalky pallor and, with the onset of rigor mortis, calcium ions move into muscle tissue. Bacteria within the corpse rapidly multiply and — if the mouth is not ajar — escaping gases push it open. Expect this noxious sigh about three hours after death. In the absence of embalming and/or refrigeration, putrefaction kicks in after 48 hours. The flesh — now a creamy consistency — turns black where it is exposed. Decomposition speeds up; the body collapses. As the body dries out, some surfaces may develop mold; cheese-like odors come to the fore.

These are the realities that Sudhoff sees as whitewashed for the average person, with an alienating and dissociative effect on our view of death. She is not comfortable with the impersonal clean-up job that characterizes our funeral industry. Her photographs of stains on fabric – stains that are the result of exiting body fluids after death – are part memorial to the deceased and part protest against the denial shrouding death and decay in our culture.

“People are no longer dying under the care of an immediate family member,” says Sudhoff. “This care and clean up is hired out. I am not making a judgment on this practice but rather suggesting that these actions remove us from the eventuality of what is to come.”

It’s common practice, for example, to preserve a corpse in order to present it as if it were still living during an open-casket funeral. It gives us finality, but not reality. U.S. laws on the treatment of bodies are determined by individual states, though it is generally required that corpses are refrigerated and embalmed within 24 hours. Embalming on a large scale was first ordered by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War to ensure families received well-preserved bodies of dead soldiers since transporting the dead home took weeks.

And her own inevitable demise? Sudhoff is keenly aware of the business of death.

“I have already communicated my final wishes to my family,” she says. “I do not wish to become the property of an undertaker. I do not wish my body to be drained and pumped full of chemicals and placed inside a fancy facade. Rather, I want my body to be cared for by those who knew and loved me. To be buried in a dirt grave or wooden box. Simple, straightforward and personal.”

Houston Chronicle
April 9, 2010
By Douglass Britt

Anyone who saw photographer Sarah Sudhoff’s Repository last year at Art League Houston — work that grew out of her 2004 surgery for cervical cancer — already knows she turns an unwavering gaze on the body in medical contexts. Tissue samples, blood-soaked gauze, medical instruments, the artist herself — all were served up for the examination of anyone who dared to look.

In her second Houston solo show, At the Hour of Our Death at De Santos Gallery, Sudhoff again draws inspiration from personal experience. At 17, she lost a friend to suicide and watched a crew steam-clean his bedroom carpet, removing the signs of what had transpired just hours before. For her new series of color photos — all works date from 2010 — she’s trained her lens on what trauma-scene cleanup crews whisk away from the scenes where death occurs.

It sounds morbid. But Sudhoff’s preoccupation isn’t so much with death’s gruesomeness as our conflicted relationship with what is, after all, a process we all go through.

“Today, in Western society, most families leave to a complete stranger the responsibility of preparing a loved one’s body for its final resting place,” Sudhoff writes in one of the clearest artist statements I’ve read in recent memory. “Traditional mourning practices, which allowed for the creation of Victorian hair jewelry or other memento mori items, have fallen out of fashion. Now the stain of death is quickly removed, and the scene where a death occurs is cleaned and normalized. … The modern means of dealing with death promises to shield mourners from the most graphic aspects of death, yet the emotional and psychological impact of such loss lingers long after any physical evidence of this process has been erased.”

Sudhoff photographs trauma-scene bedding, carpet and upholstery swatches — all stained with body fluids from a recent death — in a warehouse where they are temporarily held before incineration. She tacks each swatch to the wall, where it is illuminated by the crew’s floodlights, and tries “to slow the moments before and after death to a single frame,” she writes.

She titles each 40-by-30-inch print with the cause of death followed by the gender and age of the victim. Because the color is gorgeously saturated and the compositions are reminiscent of post-World War II abstract painting, you’re immediately drawn to their formal beauty, only to be stopped in your tracks by the truth. You might think you’ve seen the rich blues and stained composition in a Helen Frankenthaler painting, but Frankenthaler never painted Heart Attack, Male, 50 years old (II). No, that’s not a study after a canvas from Adolph Gottlieb’s Burst series; it’s Suicide with Gun, Male, 40 years old.

The photos’ richly textured beauty gives way to repulsion, then back to beauty again. A similar tension operates between feelings of immersion and detachment. Confronting Sudhoff’s evidence on her terms — “to allow what is generally invisible to become visible, and to engage with a process from which we have become disconnected” — is both awful and strangely consoling.

Art Lies Issue No. 62
Written by Garland Fielder
July 2009

What if you had a specific date in your mind—in your life—that dictated your demise? Would that be enough to set you off? To push you over the edge and make the ultimate choice of consequence? Or would it make you want to document your imminent end of days? What would be the point of an endeavor faced with such a definite cadence? For most of us, the endpoint of our lives is blessedly murky, and art that deals with the topic tends to be as well. While Damien Hirst comes to mind, with his epic and yet approachable oeuvre of commoditized carpe diem, Sarah Sudhoff’s Repository, on view at Art League Houston, deals us another hand altogether.
The artist presents her triumphant battle with cervical cancer in an unflinching manner, direct in its message and methodology.

The experience of viewing the exhibition pulls into focus several cultural issues but remains defiantly its own—and not overly didactic or sentimental. The end result is presumably aligned with the artist’s own reckoning with mortality: honest, direct and merciless, yet somehow cathartic and life-affirming.

The exhibit consists of photographs and videos pertaining to doctor/ patient dynamics. Perhaps the most poignant works are several elegantly staged photographs of the artist as patient, positioned in various waiting-room poses. Her gaze is directed at the viewer, and the photographic apparatus is often apparent, à la Cindy Sherman. Other aspects of the work define Sudhoff’s aesthetic. Lighting and medical implements in these images feel more staged than discovered. This works to her advantage, given the highly personal content of these images. In other words, Sudhoff’s use of the medical environment as a stage makes sense. It emboldens the artist in a way that is clearly reflected in her compositions. The emphasis placed on her formal choices mirrors her medical ones (or lack thereof).

In the photograph Exam 2, Sudhoff sits astride a gynecological examination table loosely draped in a patient’s gown, legs straddling the forefront of the composition yet not explicitly so. Her right breast is subtly exposed (if the term subtle can be employed here) matching her defiant, almost haughty gaze. This posture matches her state of mind, which is the theme of the exhibition—and the theme of her life at the time, really. In the face of such a dilemma, the very act of creation serves as no less than a beacon for humanity. Even though Sudhoff’s affliction proved survivable, generating an aesthetic out of the experience takes an important, almost oppositional stance to artists such as Matthew Barney, who invent dramatic tropes in order to enigmatically abstract them. Sudhoff has the grace to let the parody of life define her work, and the talent to do it in such a way as to make it art, life, death and all the stuff in between.

Ciel Variable no. 83
Rx: Chantal Gervais, Cindy Stelmackowich, Sarah Sudhoff
By Corina Ilea

Sarah Sudhoff’s intimate knowledge of cervical cancer triggers a step forward into the conflicted feelings of a patient facing a necessary medical intrusion that must also become a form of public scrutiny. The artist’s self-portrait within the aseptic environment of the hospital reveals a tensed body subjected not only to the inquiring gaze of her doctors, but also, within the space of the exhibition, to the look of total strangers, who witness a highly intimate hypostasis behind which lurks the raw presence of the actual cervical cancer. This striking presence determines her confrontation with a disease the cure for which requires a radical invasion of her body – a body now centered around a foreign presence, producing an emotional fragmentation. Disease and suffering relocate the body at the core of the impaired organs, creating an awareness that the previous muteness of the internal structure has been transformed into an explicit surfacing, therefore stripped of intimacy. And the more so, if we consider the artist’s representations of the ill body within the medical environment, a space designed to survey and exhibit what is unseen.