What I'm Working On Now: In Perpetuity

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I’m coming to the end of a multi-year photography project — I think. Artists never truly know when a project is done until it’s actually done. But my sense is I’m close on this one. What makes me sense this? Intuition.

Many of my prior formal projects were contained to a year-long exploration into a question. Portraits on Estrangement let me dip into the realities around parental estrangement experiences. Womxn without Children fostered conversations around societal expectations on womxn who don’t take on the identity of mother. However, this project, In Perpetuity (name pending), has invited me to wander around in death for several years.

It began in 2024 while driving out to visit my mom in the middle of Texas. It wasn’t our first road trip out that way, but it was the first one where the increasing number of road side cemeteries off the highways caught my attention.

2024 © Christine Lee Smith, Leavitt’s Mortuary, Ogden, Utah, 2024

My instinctual response was, “They’re so close to the road. How does anyone visit in peace?” I’m learning that they mostly don’t visit. When I approached my mom about this Texan phenomena she said something to the effect of, “Oh, yeah. There’s a lot of them about out here. You should see the one in the Tractor Supply parking lot!”

Yes, of course, we went and saw the historical cemetery in the Tractor Supply parking lot. It was wild. A perfect mixing of sacred ground and commerce.

One thing led to another and I was fully in on this idea of documenting cemeteries in odd spaces, long forgotten, or inconvenient to advancement. I’ve discovered cemeteries next to brand new housing developments (complete with a view from the back yard!), cemeteries near crazy clown motels (thanks, Teresa!), and cemeteries that feel more like Disneyland, on the opposite end of the spectrum of my explorations.

I’ve covered a lot of ground, and I have a few more western cemeteries to document this summer. That’s where your support comes in. You’re helping me cover the time and costs of making this work — good work about hard things. Because this project needs to be made now while we’re on the cusp of sweeping changes in technology where the quieter parts of our lives, the limitations of humanity, are being gobbled up by AI companies and private equity firms.

I’ve had a couple opportunities to do test runs on photographs from this project, including the one in this post. I printed it at 60”x40” and put it behind museum glass (no reflection) in a 2” white wood frame. Last year it exhibited in the Biola University show I curated called Now is Always. It became a central part of the show. The conversations that flowed from that singular photograph from the project convinced me to carry on with the project when I was feeling less sure about it.

I’ve done a lot of research around the death industry since starting this project — including a private tour at Forest Lawn Memorial Park in Glendale, California (now that was WILD). And I’m becoming more certain that the time for this project is now. Now may be always, but now is pertinent to our unfolding cultural reshaping.

I’ll save my final thoughts on this project for its official release, but I’ll conclude here in saying: meditating on death could save us from our own destruction. God willing.

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