The Stoic view that meditating on death’s inevitability, one can live more fully in the present moment is a theme throughout the ages.

“Let us compose our thoughts as if we’ve reached the end. Let us postpone nothing. Let’s settle our accounts with life every day.”

Seneca

The concept of celebrating death in life is a theme throughout cultures and religions.

Samhain, Dia se los Meurtos, Ullambana, the Hungry Ghost. The Danse Macabre.

Momento mori can be overt and packed with symbolism, as in vanitas paintings. Alternatively many familiar pictures are subtle examples ( Sunflowers by Van Gogh for example).

“Photography is an elegiac art, a twilight art. Most subjects photographed are, just by virtue of being photographed, touched with pathos. … All photographs are memento mori. To take photograph is to participate in another person’s mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt”

Susan Sontag

In this gallery I have presented my photographs representing momento mori. Still life. Nature morte.