Diana Michener: Bones / Mortes by Michener, Diana;

Long description:

I went to look, to see if I could see, though of course death is far too mysterious to encounter or embrace. - Diana Michener

This limited edition presents the two series in Diana Micheners oeuvre that most intensely confront the mystery of life and death. The first book Bones shows images of both human and animal bones, photographed between 2018 and 2021 and many in the restricted collections of natural history museums, thus revealing objects not normally accessible to the public. For Michener bones are the physical trace of a soul and treasured vessels of lives past: Bones bear witness to a life, she says, and in and of themselves they show the magnificent structures of our forms. They are what is left. Mortes explores Micheners complex relationship to death, one of terror and wonder, of reverence and acceptance, through the confronting subjects of the heads of slaughtered cows, a collection of deformed nineteenth-century foetuses preserved in formaldehyde in glass jars, and human corpses during autopsy. Seen as a whole, Bones / Mortes touches on our unease with the brute physicality of death while conveying Micheners admiration for the body as a glorious construct, as impressive in life as in death.