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| Cofani Funebri 2011 (Italy) |
Last year I contemplated the appropriateness of publishing the photos of dead people. And in the last two days I’ve come across something that I find culturally disturbing, so to speak. Although I realise that funeral industry IS the industry, to view a report from a funeral fair in Moscow took me by surprise, if only because I’ve never heard about or seen anything similar in England.
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| Lindner 2010 (Poland) |
Turns out, this wasn’t yet the biggest shock I was to experience. This report has kind of shook me up, there are a couple of lines of text in Russian, while the rest is, well, an introduction to the contemporary coffin advertising. Now, there was a time when I was bemused by the Russian nude photography (I still am sometimes). Imagine a buxom blond “sex bomb” with her hair down posing against the sunset next to a thin birch tree, a Russian symbol of femininity and ritual chastity. When you look at the photos produced by the Polish and Italian funeral services advertisers, you will see why I recalled that rather disturbing dissociation between the idea and how it is channeled into an image.
We should, by all means, look at the bright side of life and death, and what can be a better way of breaking away from the stereotypes than putting a model in naughty tartan bikini next to a coffin? But is this game of advertising really worth the candles (excuse the pun)?
You tell me.
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| Lindner 2011 (Poland) |
. Since then the site where the audio was originally hosted has shut down, and I decided to accompany the audio with the images of