The Emptiness of the Mattress

Anyone who has spent hours, days, or nights beside someone nearing death knows that in this photograph, the presence of death is the absence. One hears the inarticulate howling outside the window—the same hum that sometimes speaks of the city's murmur, at other times of birdsong and the blowing wind. Anyone who has witnessed a loved one in their final moments hears in this image the sound of their slow or rapid breathing—breaths that sink into the body and linger for a long time.

The photographer, with that overhead angle, has nothing to watch over. The picture has nothing to display. No color runs through it; only a mattress with the color of soil, speaking of wounds, and a scrap of white sheet likely pulled across it.

This image speaks entirely of death—not only because of its subject matter but also because we know that a photograph is still, static, unmoving; it narrates the past. And yet, anyone who has sat beside someone dying knows how time becomes distorted—how, even as you constantly face the spectacle of death, you cannot help but hear more clearly the sound of life outside: the blowing wind, the distant stirrings. And you realize that, despite the photograph’s insistence on portraying only death, it ultimately fails—utterly and completely—to do so.