ECC Team: What inspired you to focus on photographing the bodies at Isaiah Owens' funeral home, and how did you approach the families to gain their permission for such an intimate project?

I had recently lost both my parents, who died suddenly just three months apart. I was grieving, and I wanted to somehow use photography to help me understand the almost incomprehensible transition from life to death. I heard about a funeral director in Harlem who still practised an old-style Southern Baptist traditional burial where people were dressed up to prepare to enter Paradise. The idea of death being an occasion where you dressed in your finest outfits fascinated me. I began to wonder what would happen if I removed all trappings of a funeral ceremony, including a coffin, and photographed the beautifully dressed bodies in natural poses, using professional portrait lighting, as if I were making a portrait of a living human being.

I experimented by asking the funeral home to place one of the corpses, a woman who died at age 102, on a plain black background so that the coffin could not be seen, positioned with the body upright. The figure still looked stiff, so I asked the staff to move the hands and head into relaxed positions, directing in much the same way as if I were creating a conventional portrait. I overpowered the harsh artificial light with gentle portrait lighting so that her pink gown and hat glowed. Suddenly the personality and character of my subject emerged. It felt as if I were looking at a person and not merely a body. I could see the human being she once was.

I did not want to impose on people who were in the throes of grief, so I asked the funeral director to approach the family members for permission to take the photos and I offered them a photograph if they wanted it. Virtually everyone accepted. I photographed in the early morning hours after the families had viewed the bodies the night before, and before the burial service so I did not interfere with the funeral ceremony.

ECC Team: You mentioned feeling like an outsider while capturing these images. How did this perspective influence the way you approached and photographed the subjects?

I was an outsider, for so many different reasons. I’m white, born and raised in the North of the US, not the South, I am not a Christian or a believer in any god. I don't believe in the Afterlife. I wasn’t part of the Harlem community, not even slightly. Although I found the Southern Baptist traditions deeply moving, I was photographing a ritual that was foreign to me. The funeral director called the journey to heaven “Going to The Party” and he would tease me about my lack of belief: “Elizabeth Heyert, she’s not going to the Party.” I’d laugh but it also made me feel quite lonely. However, I like to think my outsider status helped me distance myself from the traditional funeral rites so that I could create an unconventional artwork about looking at death. That was my intention, to find a link between the moment of life and the moment of death, not to merely make a documentary project.

I was also an outsider on another level. I couldn’t speak to the people I photographed, so I asked the funeral director as many questions as possible about each of their histories, their families, and even their quirks and habits. Often the funeral service included a booklet with stories and photos of the person being buried and I studied those for clues about them. I spent 2-3 hours taking each photo, standing on a ladder with a large format camera for a long exposure, often 45 minutes at a time. Those private moments alone with each subject felt intimate, and it seemed as if I got to know them well. Reality set in the day after each shoot when I’d see the proofs, and, of course, I couldn’t share their beautiful portraits with them. The gulf between the dead and the living became painfully clear.

ECC Team: Your work touches on historical, cultural, and religious dimensions of a vanishing piece of cultural history. Can you elaborate on how you navigated and captured these layers in your photographs?

I would never presume to speak as an expert on the history, culture or religion of a community I am not a part of. However, one of the remarkable things I learned from this project is how universal the experience of looking at the dead seems to be. We all die but in the culture I come from, and I believe in much of Western culture, death is hidden to a certain extent. Even having an open coffin is more and more rare. In the twenty years since I created The Travelers, I attended many exhibitions of the works in various countries. The response to the portraits was often very personal. Countless people spoke to me openly and emotionally about their own experiences with death and remarked on similarities between my subjects and their departed family members and friends. Instead of viewing the people in my series as belonging to a separate and unfamiliar community, many people related to them on a basic human level, as I did, without regard to cultural or religious differences. I continue to find that very moving and hopeful.

ECC Team: The juxtaposition of traditional burial customs with contemporary clothing in your photographs is striking. How did you decide to highlight this contrast, and what do you think it reveals about the community and its evolution?

Family members or friends chose what clothes their loved ones wore for burial. Some people opted to borrow a traditional dress from the funeral home, where there was a selection of pastel-coloured long dresses adorned with sequins. Some people were dressed in their favourite clothes, including jewellery for the women, and wonderful hats for both genders. What they wore was rarely my choice. In a few cases, if I saw from photos in the booklets provided for the funeral service, that someone had dressed in a particularly striking outfit for a party or a special occasion during their lifetime, I asked the funeral director to see if the family would mind if they were buried in that outfit, which they usually agreed to. I did not intentionally highlight the contrast between the old style and the new. It came about naturally depending on the age and the background of the deceased.