MORTALITY SALIENCE

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Mortality Salience is an ongoing visual sociology project centering around topics of death and dying. This project began at Laney Community College in Oakland, California, when I was studying traditional film photography while majoring in Sociology. When I first became interested in darkroom printing and building prisms for my lenses, I would practice taking portraits with the statues at Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland. 

I spent hours wandering the cemetery, absorbing the details of breathtaking symbolism and varying architecture. Photographing cemeteries inspired me to focus my sociological studies around this. I was a teaching assistant for the Sociology of Death and Dying at Berkeley City College which taught me new ways to view death and dying through the lens of sociology, and this experience provided me with a unique opportunity to have discussions with others about a variety of topics ranging from personal grief and mourning to homicide and genocide. As an undergraduate in UCLA’s Sociology Department, I focused my thesis research on grief and bereavement in the context of job loss during Covid-19. After finishing my degree, I felt inspired to work within the death industry, to experience the realities of a system that I spent years researching. I have gained a different type of hands-on knowledge which has changed some of my core perspectives, and in turn has informed the evolution of Mortality Salience. I began working at the front desk in a funeral home, which provided me with an opportunity to return to school and obtain a degree in Mortuary Science. I currently work as a mortician, training to be an embalmer, at a funeral home in Los Angeles which each day gives me new insights into experiences of loss, the functions and legal layers of death systems, as well as the many cultural practices in mourning.

Mortality Salience: Cemetery Scapes is a collection of 35mm and medium format film photographs of the cemeteries that I have visited. The images range from large scale architecture, to small hidden gems found while walking. All surreal effects were made in-camera, using multiple exposures or using prisms that I’ve built, been gifted, or found within mundane objects. Each photograph comes with a small description of the cemetery or of the statue which provides both historical context as well as my thoughts and experiences while visiting.