mortalitysalience — Bailey Kobelin

MORTALITY SALIENCE

follow the project on Instagram @mortalitysalience

Mortality Salience is an ongoing visual sociology project centering around topics of death and dying. I created this project at Laney Community College when I was studying traditional film photography while majoring in Sociology. When I first became interested in darkroom printing and building prisms for my lenses, I would practice portraiture on the statues at Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland. I spent hours wandering the park, absorbing the details of breathtaking symbolism and architecture. This showed me how much you can learn about a society by looking at the placement of the deceased. Because of my cemetery photography, I was driven to focus my sociological studies around this. I was a tutor/teaching assistant for the Sociology of Death and Dying at Berkeley City College which taught me so much about viewing death & dying through the lens of sociology, and provided me with a unique opportunity to teach students about a variety of topics ranging from grief and mourning to homicide and genocide. As an undergraduate at UCLA, I focused my thesis research on grief and bereavement in the context of job loss during Covid-19. Currently, I work at a funeral home in Los Angeles, which each day gives me new insights into experiences of loss, the functions and legal layers of death systems, as well as the many different cultural practices in mourning.

Cemetery Scapes

Mortality Salience: Cemetery Scapes is my collection of 35mm, medium format, and large format film photographs of the cemeteries that I have visited. All images are available as prints (Contact me for sizes and pricing).

"The Angel of Grief Weeping Over the Dismantled Altar of Life" Cypress Lawn Memorial Park, Colma CA, 2018

Cypress Lawn Memorial Park, Colma CA, 2018

The Unveiling

design by Beca Irizarry — Flyer by Beca Irizarry

Mortality Salience: The Unveiling was the first public art show. It was held for one month in 2019 at Econo Jam Records in Oakland. This portion of the project utilizes ethnographic research elements, as it combines recorded interviews with traditional film photography. Subjects were photographed in a studio or in a personal space of their choice-some in their living room, or favorite outdoor park. Before I took their portrait, I recorded a conversation between us, using a rough outline of interview questions that I wrote inspired from the class I was a TA for. I noticed which questions ignited students' interests and I used those topics to inform how and what I would ask my subjects.

Each subject’s portrait was printed and displayed along with a quote from their interview. The result was more powerful than I could have imagined. The experience of speaking so openly with people from all walks of life was inspiring, and I believe that you can really see that in the images. I listened to each interview over and over, and selected the quotes that stood out to me as the most unique. For the month that these pieces were on display in the gallery, I had many people tell me that this project inspired them to open up more about their experiences or opinions surrounding grief, bereavement, and mourning. The manager even told me how he witnessed complete strangers engaging in a personal conversation while looking at the pieces.

The images and interviews from this portion of the project are only available to view in person when a public show is held. I made this decision before the realities of a pandemic, when I felt that social media had weakened the art scene. Posting this type of work to social media holds little value because viewing a project is a social experience in itself, and these interactions are what ultimately forms the foundation of art community. With social distancing guidelines in place, I will not be having public shows for some time, however I have decided to stick with the decision that this portion of my project will not appear in digital scapes. It will be seen and experienced in only physical, tangible, impermanent space.

If you wish to be a participant, or would like more information on the project, please Contact me!