“Hospice: A Photographic Inquiry” to open at UB

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- "My generation of Americans never learned to cope very well with death..."

So begins a catalogue essay that accompanies the remarkable and moving exposition, "Hospice: A Photographic Inquiry," that will run June 11-July 25 in the UB Art Gallery in the Center for the Arts on the North Campus.

The exhibit, which features the work of such nationally regarded photographers as Nan Goldin and Sally Mann, originated at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., in 1992, and has toured the country for the past six years.

The show is free of charge and open to the public, which is invited to the opening reception from 7-9 p.m. June 11. Gallery hours are 10:30 a.m. to 8 p.m. Wednesdays through Saturdays, and noon to 5 p.m. Sundays. For further information, call the gallery at 645-6912.

The National Hospice Foundation conceived the project as a way to expand public understanding of the power and importance of hospice care. The insights shared by exhibitors, who include some of the country's most sensitive artists and writers, is born of their immersion into hospice and the lives of people it serves -- the dying and their families.

David Levy, president and director of the Corcoran, praises "the gifted photographers who accepted this creative challenge to achieve a level of communication and meaning that only art makes possible."

Mann, Goldin, Jan Goldberg, Jack Radcliffe and Kathy Vargas -- the major contributors to the exhibit's visual aspect -- spent hundreds of hours with dying individuals and their families in order that they speak in their own voices of their experiences on what Levy calls one of life's "most difficult and emotionally treacherous journeys."

Their photos are joined by essays by Marilyn Webb and noted photographic scholar Jane Livingston, interviews by Philip Brookman and stills from a film by Susan Froemke, Deborah Dickson and Albert Maysles.

In their presentations, neither photographers nor writers put a gloss on the dying process. Although some images, Mann's in particular, are metaphoric -- and no less powerful for that -- most subjects are presented directly and concretely.

The sensitivity and tenderness of photographers, writers, caretakers and patients in the face of inexorable loss are often unexpected, astonishing and revealing. Audrey Hill, a 59-year-old woman, was dying of metastatic cervical cancer. Her son reported at the time: "She's said that, except for the fact that she is dying, this has been the most terrific time of her life."

One of her caretakers called Audrey's death "a birthing."

The exhibit is sponsored in Buffalo by the UB Art Gallery, the Marks Family Foundation and the Center for Hospice and Palliative Care. The exhibition brochure will be in English- and Spanish-language versions and the show will be accompanied by a number of educational events.