Body Bag Series
By Heather Oelklaus
9 Aug 2008
For the past decade my husband worked the same job day after day slowly getting the life sucked out of him. We decided to throw caution to the wind and have him persue the career he truly loved. Almost instantly the light in his eyes came back and he was alive again. It made me wonder how many people are out there walking around half dead with life swirling around them.
Funny how opportunities a raise just at the right moment...a local mortician saw my photography and gave me a brand spankin' new body bag (toe tag included). This unique gift sparked my imagination and my "Body Bag Series" emerged.
In the series I show life through a symbol of death...the body bag. In order to portray the feeling of slow demise, I made sure to pose all the models standing in the body bag instead of lying down.
As the series progressed I felt the need to say something more. The political climate has influenced my latest work with the body bag. Instead of the models posing within a "normal" setting, I've positioned them with oil drills and military aircrafts.
I began shooting the series with the obvious choice of cameras, the Crown Graphic. In the past the Crown Graphic was widely used as a crime scene camera. Recently, I have incorporated the Hasselblad and the Holga to capture the images.
