Two photography books – one about the plight of the elderly, the other about Nazi doctors – share a concern with the evaluation of life from starkly opposed positions.
Sean Sheehan
In an abstract way, one person’s life may not count for much but from a human perspective an individual’s life is precious, and its worth lies beyond the countable.
Medical science seeks to gather data and draws conclusions from facts but care for the elderly is driven by another type of knowledge, one that that cannot be calculated.
In “Before the time comes”, documentary photographer Sibylle Fendt records moments as people in their homes, cared for by family and friends, approach the final stages of their lives.
Some of them look to be lost in the mirror of memories, evoking the sense that Ezra Pound, in the opening of the “Pisan cantos”, calls “the enormous tragedy of the dream”, but the photographs are not depressing. Compassion and closeness attend the cared for and the carers and this allows for the emotional depth that Fendt brings to her work. Having suffered the grief of her own husband’s fatal illness, Fendt and her children were able to care for him at home.
She describes her feeling of being afraid of losing the memories of his last days: “I want to hold on to these days. Everything. Every second, every feeling, everything that happened. All these indescribable, incomprehensible, uncategorisable events. And I don’t know what to do with myself”.
Afterwards, she set about finding others in a similar situation and how this was managed without disturbing the sensitivities of those involved is movingly described in this interview.
The result is a book of deeply benevolent images interspersed with short quotations from some of those she photographed.
A jarringly opposed view of life and death is the subject of “The weight of the world” by photographer Piero Martinello and historian Piero Casentini.
They present, visually and textually, the work of nine Nazi doctors whose names were – and, shockingly, still are in some cases – given to pathologies that they were the first to identify and describe. The chilling disjunction between their scientific success and the crimes they committed is difficult to accommodate but cannot be buried: “The result is an invitation to dwell on the deontological [philosophical study of duty and obligations] and ethical dimension of science and the immunity that it sometimes enjoys”.
For each of the nine doctors, the medical speciality associated with their surnames is depicted in images and this is followed by their biography and photographs of their public and private life.
The book is designed to shock by allowing readers to freely respond to the aesthetics of medical images and then learn about the awful crimes, amounting to torture and murder, committed by the doctors in their research.
“Before the time comes” by Sibylle Fendt is published by Kehrer. “The weight of the world”, by Piero Martyinello and Piero Casentini is published by Fw:Books.
(Photos supplied by the publisher)
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