Julie Scheurweghs
Photographer
Julie Scheurweghs lives and works in Brussels where she obtained a Masters degree in LUCA school of arts in 2010. After her first Solo Exhibition called ‘Accidentally on purpose’ in Amsterdam in 2012 she quickly made her Belgian solo debut in Knokke and has had numerous solo and group shows since. Apart from being a photographer, Julie Scheurweghs is also an avid collector of photographs, both old and new, that have been discarded or even labeled trash. In her work, Scheurweghs uses these decaying images, disconnected from their original owners, as a medium to provide an intimate look into the personal lives of strangers and as a powerful metaphor for the ephemerality of human life.
Hans Maes
Professor, Philosopher
Hans Maes is Senior Lecturer and Co-Director of the Aesthetics Research Centre at the University of Kent, United Kingdom. He is the editor of Portraits and Philosophy (Routledge, 2020) and author of ‘What is a Portrait? (British Journal of Aesthetics 2015). Other publications include: Conversations on Art and Aesthetics (Oxford University Press, 2017), Pornographic Art and The Aesthetics of Pornography (Palgrave MacMillan, 2013), and Art and Pornography (Oxford University Press, 2012). He is Vice-President of the British Society of Aesthetics and Past President of the Dutch Association of Aesthetics.
Abstract
In Memory’s Garden (2014) is a study in funerary photography. Photographs of flower bouquets adorning individual graves are juxtaposed with photographs of the small enamel portraits one often finds on Belgian gravestones. Many of these older pictures have now faded beyond recognition. As such, they exemplify one of the great paradoxes of portraiture, namely, that portraits often serve as powerful reminders of the inevitable oblivion that awaits us all, notwithstanding their aim to precisely ward off oblivion and preserve the memory of a person.
Philosopher’s Comment
OBLIVION
In the past few years, I’ve been thinking a lot about melancholy. Melancholy, as I understand it, arises when we grasp a profound but painful truth about the world, such as the transience of all things, the judgmental nature of human beings, or the indifference of the universe. These existential insights can make us feel anxious, hopeless, or lonely, but they can also make us appreciate more deeply the things that we value or love. For example, realizing that our life is finite and fragile can make us cherish the moments we spend with our loved ones, or the opportunity we have to pursue our passions. In this way, negative feelingscan co-occur or alternate with positive emotions, such as joy, gratitude, or wonder, resulting in a bittersweet melancholy.
While nostalgia – that other bittersweet emotion – is necessarily backward looking, melancholy is not. In fact, melancholy will often involve future-oriented reflections on one’s impending mortality or the bleak prospects of humanity more generally. Melancholy can also be distinguished from sadness or grief. These are negative emotions that result from a loss or a disappointment that affects our well-being. Sadness and grief are usually unpleasant and undesirable states that we want to overcome or avoid. Melancholy, on the other hand, is not necessarily unpleasant or undesirable. It is often savoured and can be a source of wisdom, creativity, or beauty.
One way to appreciate the positive aspects of melancholy is to consider its aesthetic dimension. When reflection on a profound but harsh truth about human existence puts the aesthetic or artistic value of something in sharp relief in such a way that one comes to appreciate it more deeply, we may speak of aesthetic melancholy.That photographs can elicit such a poignant experience is not a new idea. Photography has the power to capture moments in time that are fleeting and irreversible. It can thus underline the transience and fragility of life, as well as the beauty and charm of the world. This has perhaps most famously been thematized by Roland Barthes in Camera Lucida. However, the effect of what Barthes calls the ‘punctum’ is unintended. It is what strikes us in a photograph without it being deliberately shown by the photographer. That raises the question whether photographs can also intentionally and successfully convey the complex experience of melancholy as I have outlined it here.
I believe they can. However, when one searches the internet for “melancholy photographs” the resulting images are typically glum and bleak, that is, much more bitter than bittersweet. Moreover, they often depict someone in the reflective state of melancholy, rather than purposively engendering that state in the viewer. A picture of melancholy does not in and of itself constitute a melancholic picture. By contrast, Julie Scheurweghs’ photographic series In Memory’s Garden offers not a depiction of melancholy, though it is deeply melancholic, I would say. It serves as a powerful reminder of human transience and the oblivion that awaits us all, but at the same time it brings home the precarious beauty of cemeteries and, I dare add, of photography itself.