Lisa Ross Photographs Black Garden

Lisa Ross shoots the art I'd make if I made the time. Not the photographs, but the shrines themselves. Markers for everything that was supposed to be, but isn't. That should be, but cannot or will not. Shrines and burial sites in the form of dried sticks, ladders, fences, and scarves. Burial cribs with doors. These, from China.

Not for babies - mine, anyway - but for ideas. Dreams. Expectations. Hope. Faith. Trust. And then some.

Comments

[Sarah]

Beautiful.

[Kristen]

I have always thought that the most beautiful shrines are more abstract - the ones we make out of choices and mercy and awareness and generosity. So many things are supposed - but I wonder why we suppose them? Expect them? Where does that "should"ness come from, I wonder? Father Knows Best? Leave it to Beaver? Assumptions we have come, not only to make, but to pass along, about what we should expect. But as I do genealogy, and I watch families as they wax and wane through the document, that death had to be an assumption for so many, for so many thousands of years. Hope - I suppose, where we love, we hope. When our hearts soar at the rise of beauty, we hope. Hope is not a guarantee, but the whisper of what life could be, and that turns into could have been as the days and years unfold.

I am not sure that I like the idea of tiny fences around plots of ground, around lives finished - early or late. As though you could hold something there, even though the essence of that life - I believe - is now free of gravity. The tokens of love, I understand. But I have no response to graves, I find. I never visit those places of people I once knew - not even to leave flowers. Because my hope is linked to the wider reality of live and love - and for some reason, I really believe that mortality is a thin and temporary shell. My people are not in the little space. And so I try to honor them and decorate their memory be being what they would have supposed I should have been - while I still have time here to be it.