This Mortal Coil

This Mortal Coil

What started out as a meditation on corporeal death became somewhat abstract by the end. I started out placing a man floating above a cemetery of sorts, with strings like tendrils anchoring him to the ground. Once I added a texture of clock gears to his skin, it seemed to become less human, less spiritual, and more a meditation on time, or even trying to overcome time. I added the chains to imply being chained to the concept of time, and then pulled them away from the subject to imply being tree of it. The lights in his body and the chain tips were added as a connection to power, or life force, perhaps a comment on the fact that time, while confining, finite and conceived by mankind, is also what defines us as human, and, if freed from it, we lose our context, our sense of self, and our life as we know it. Death is that release, and the price of that freedom from the comfort of our cage of time, is unknown to us while chained to our liner lives.

In terms of the original shot itself, I wanted to tackle and address something I see a lot of in this weird world of conceptual photography - the floating or levitating human. Sure, it's cool to give the illusion of levitation, but it's being done a LOT, and what's missing from almost every single one of the pieces I see is the WHY or the context. Why is this person floating? What does it mean? What are you trying to say with it, beyond the "isn't it cool" element of it? I wanted to make sure I had one, and not do it "just because."

Model: Gilberto Mendez

The title comes from the famous and oft-quoted soliloquy from William Shakespeare, from Hamlet::

To die, to sleep,
To sleep, perchance to Dream; Aye, there's the rub,
For in that sleep of death, what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There's the respect
That makes Calamity of so long life:
For who would bear the Whips and Scorns of time…