Picturing Absence – 3 Photographs in the DAM's Collection

Yoko Ikeda

Yoko Ikeda finds poetry in the humble details of everyday life. In her photographs, she plays with perception, color, textures, and forms to create beauty and meaning in unexpected places.

In this picture, Ikeda focuses our attention on the threshold of a home in Japan, a space through which one often quickly passes and rarely dwells. The earthy tones and the visual play between the wooden and patterned concrete flooring are punctuated by four pairs of rosy-pink house slippers, awaiting their owners’ departure or return. We do not see the inhabitants of this home, but we can visualize their movements and almost feel the presence of someone just about to step into the frame.

Keisha Scarville

Keisha Scarville reflects on themes of family, absence, and transformation, often using her own body as a medium to express these ideas in her pictures.

In the series Mama’s Clothes, Scarville responds to the death of her beloved mother Alma and explores how to photograph someone who is no longer physically here. She found inspiration in the nineteenth-century practice of spirit photography and the layered textile costume worn in the Yoruba Egungun masquerade that honors ancestors. Scarville incorporates her mother’s colorful patterned garments, which carry scents and memories, to evoke her presence and absence simultaneously. Here, the artist’s own body draped with her mother’s clothes begins to meld with the landscape, acting as a metaphor for grief and loss.

David Maisel

David Maisel creates beautiful photographs of devastating subjects. In 2005, Maisel learned that over 3,000 canisters containing cremated remains were recently rediscovered at Oregon State Hospital, a chronically underfunded mental health institution in Salem. The individuals were primarily patients who died between 1913–1971 and were unclaimed by kin. Maisel received permission to photograph the canisters, which were stored in an unassuming room, stacked three deep on pine shelves—this evolved into his project Library of Dust. The simple funereal urns are made of copper with leaden seams. Over time, the lead reacted with cremains inside and the surrounding environmental factors and corroded, creating beautiful mineral blooms in the most unexpected place. The colors and forms of the mineral encrustations on each copper urn are unique. In a strangely poetic way, the individuality of these souls began to reveal themselves again.

In the postscript of his book Library of Dust, David Maisel writes: "Through the creation of an archive of the dead and forgotten patients from the Oregon State Hospital, I am seeking to give those who lived with mental illness a presence that encourages their existence to be acknowledged in ways that were impossible during their lifetimes."

In 2007, the Oregon State legislature authorized funding to begin long-overdue modernization and improvement of mental health care needs in the state. As part of this project, the Oregon State Hospital Memorial (completed in 2014) was created as a space of remembrance and a dignified resting place for those who had been overlooked for far too long.