NOTE FROM MARIO: I had to take a step back from curation after 2022, I completely burnt myself out. This was also the last show I ever curated for CAMP while I was on a sort of "sabbatical". It was an online show with the work of a photographer reaching the end of his battle with cancer. Stephen unfortunately died during the duration of the show. I am glad CAMP and I were able to help him in this small way, may he rest in peace.
STATEMENT: Stephen Starkman is a photographer who, after a terminal cancer diagnosis, chose to share his confrontation of the inevitable. The CAMP Gallery is proud to share the resulting book, “The Proximity of Mortality” to spread awareness of his work and what it can do for others.
The human psyche is conditioned to avoid the reality of our own mortality, to make any and all efforts to circumvent our own deaths. but it is the ever present dread, a fact of the ultimate end of our lives that moves people to find meaning in their respective days. The truth is that death gives life meaning.
Meaning. What really has meaning in such a vast existence, where each individual makes an infinitesimally small dent in the grand scale of the infinite. Images like “landscape” and “landscape” remind the viewer of their own minuteness. Each individual is meant to imbue meaning into their lives, to drive purpose in their day to day, even if that purpose is as simple as to “live well”.
In what was meant to be the autumn of his life, Stephen Starkman has chosen to imbue meaning by sharing his experience as he navigates the end stages of a disease from which both his parents died prematurely. In his book, The Proximity of Mortality, he explores the artificial dreariness of modern medical facilities with astounding candor (Proximity of Mortality 1), while also occasionally finding the beauty in even the most mundane details of this mise en scene (Proximity of Mortality 2).
These glimpses into plastic habitats are contextualized by vast expansive landscapes, reminiscent of the passing of time and the permanence of nature. Starkman communicates universal truth in this project, one that may scare the viewer about the reality of death, but also comfort them that it makes them part of a greater system that exists beyond any single person. It speaks to the sentiment of existence after life ends, an experience of the future that goes beyond within the spectrum of human tangibility. In a sense, The Proximity of Mortality is a statement on continuance and permanence, one where we each leave something behind as we transition out of this life. Its reflective nature about what is to come is reminiscent of the Julia de Burgos poem “Poema Para Mi Muerte”:
“Incorporarme el último, el integral minuto, y ofrecerme a los campos con limpieza de estrella doblar luego la hoja de mi carne sencilla, y bajar sin sonrisa, ni testigo a la inercia.”
“To incorporate myself in the end, the integral minute, and offer myself to the fields with the purity of stars, to then fold the sheet of my simple flesh and descend without a smile, without witness, to inertia.”
Please enjoy an exclusive view of some of the images included in this photography book below.