Metamorphosis
2006
A magazine commissioned a visual interpretation of metamorphosis. I chose to photograph crematoria.
The choice was literal rather than metaphorical. Metamorphosis, in its most precise sense, is not gradual change. It is the complete replacement of one state by another through a process that destroys the original form in producing the new one. What enters the cremation chamber and what emerges from it share no visible continuity. Two kilograms of mineral ash remain. The rest has become water vapour, carbon, the dispersed chemical elements of a body returned to atmosphere. This is metamorphosis at its most absolute: not a transformation that preserves the original in altered form but one that unmakes it entirely.
The architecture of crematoria is built around the management of that fact.
The public chapel is designed for the living. It is calibrated to the weight of grief, to the rituals that mark a transition too large for unstructured experience, to the need of the people present to be in a space that acknowledges what is happening. It is designed to be, if not beautiful, then appropriate. Dignified. Sufficient to the occasion.
Walk through the door at the back and you are somewhere else entirely. The industrial interior of a crematorium looks like what it is: a facility where a specific process is performed reliably, at scale, every day. Steel, heat, mechanical precision. The same transformation that is singular for the families in the chapel is routine for the building. The same event experienced as irreplaceable loss on one side of a door is experienced as scheduled procedure on the other.
That door is the most significant threshold in any building I have photographed.
These photographs can reach both sides of it. They can record the chapel: the flowers, the curtains, the light coming through windows designed to offer comfort. They can record the industrial interior during the hours when the chambers are not in use: the steel doors, the mechanical architecture of heat and containment, the clean geometry of a place designed to receive the living and return something else. What the photographs cannot record is the transformation itself.
The body that enters the chamber is never photographed. What emerges is never photographed. The process, the actual metamorphosis, takes place inside an architecture that is built to contain it and that the camera cannot enter while it is happening. Photography arrives at the building and stops at the same threshold it always stops at: the one beyond which the essential event is occurring.
This is what drew me to crematoria as an answer to the commission's question. Every other interpretation of metamorphosis I could have chosen would have offered the camera access to the transformation. Here the transformation is structurally hidden. The building exists to perform it and to keep it from view simultaneously. The chapel shows you that something is happening. The industrial interior shows you the apparatus that makes it happen. Neither shows you the thing itself.
What remains, in the photographs as in the chamber, is the evidence of a process that exceeded what could be recorded. The architecture of the event. The space organised around an absence.
The commission asked for metamorphosis. This is as close as a camera can get.
