Von Lintel Gallery: Izima Kaoru

“Why can’t a corpse be beautiful?” asks Japanese fashion photographer Izima Kaoru. He explores the answer in a series of photographs entitled “Landscapes with a Corpse,” currently on display at Von Lintel Gallery. The photos are more striking than I’d expected from such a thin premise, but ultimately the effect Kaoru creates somes off as contrived and, ultimately, unnecessary. Based on the three folios available at the gallery, Kaoru has been mining this empty shaft for quite some time.

The show contains four semi-narratives, each showing a stylishly dress model lying in a position approaching that of mock death, though only successfully in one series. The first room is dominated by several large scale prints centered on the color yellow. The presence of the model seems superfluous. Without her inert presence, staring blankly into the ceiling, I might have thought this guy was an acolyte of Gursky or Burtynsky. The second room presents the other three series in smaller prints, each, again, using a simple, saturated color scheme and models playing dead. Perhaps what makes Kaoru’s work fall short is that his subjects, despite the word “corpse” in the title, aren’t actually dead at all. Of course, that hasn’t stopped others from attempting the same thing, perhaps to better effect. Take David Lynch’s Twin Peaks, for instance. The image of Laura Palmer wrapped in plastic, blue from blood loss and hair seductively wet, was an early 90s icon, particularly in Japan.

The mixture of beauty and death actually has a long history within photography and at least Western culture. Kaoru adds little to the pile. Waaaaay back in the day of daguerreotype and tintype photography, when children died at a much higher rate than today, it was not uncommon for grieving parents to have a portrait made of their dead child as a memento mori. Certainly, for them, there was a sense of beauty in those images of actual corpses, even if they only appeared to be sleeping. It's possible that this practice fell out of favor as families in America shrunk and dispersed, making personal experiences with death rare and more likely to be associated with a grim end. That's just conjecture. There's a whole weird subculture interested in this 19th C. and early 20th C. phenomenon, but also some serious scholarship.

Luc Delahaye's 2001 image "Taliban" poses the question “why can’t a corpse be beautiful” more strikingly. The large scale print was snapped up by major collectors and museums almost as soon as it became available. The image is a large-format picture of a dead Taliban militant lying in a ditch somewhere in Afghanistan. The composition and color are unmistakably meant to bring a refined aesthetic quality to the image, beyond a simple photojournalistic recording of one man’s death. In fact, following the ensuing controversy over this photo, Delahaye has redefined himself as an artist and not a photojournalist. So, why do we feel is okay to treat this person’s death as an object of collecting? What are the factors that turned a dusty corpse into something to hang on the walls of LACMA and generate $90,000 for the “artist.” For an attempt at an explanation, check out the Village Voice, though it strikes me as self-justifying gibberish.

Finally, despite having said all that, it was a thought provoking show, more because of ideas outside the images than inside them, though.

Through Nov. 13 at Von Lintel Gallery
555 West 25th St.
(212) 242-0599

The series is available as a $30, 88 page book, as well.