Tuesday Talent - Tom McGahan
One of our deepest, most universal needs, is for a sense of identity and belonging. As such, we constantly search for ways of meaning-making and remembrance. Often times, we find meaning and identity in landscape, attaching our emotions and memories to the places we have seen and touched. Our identities, as well as our memories aren’t however, always associated with happiness. Landscapes can sometimes be associated with grief, loss, and pain. In his poignant photo essay “Landscape of Lament”, Tom McGahan memorializes the stages of bereavement—denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance—within his photographs of nature’s rural, spiritual and ceaseless landscapes.
- Alexa Fahlman
I have the same name as my father, “but he’s not named after me’’ he would say, in his thick County Tyrone, Northern Irish accent. After a brief illness on the 21st of October 2017, my father gently passed away. In the immediate aftermath of his death, I embarked on this series of images to—in some way—try to record the process of grief and preserve the feelings and emotions that arose through each image. My father spent his later years in the home where he was born in Northern Ireland; it is a place that is steeped in tradition, highly polarized due to the division between the two main communities. It was almost a given that my father would have a traditional Irish wake. Dad was brought home and laid out with the casket open. For two days, friends, relatives, and clergy came to pay their respects, sit down, drink gallons of tea, and tell stories. It was all very social seeing long lost relatives and many new faces that would have been part of my father’s life. Even in the midst of the grief and exhaustion, it felt a very natural process—it brought death right up close, and in this, diminished the ultimate fear of death and dying.
In Irish tradition, when the body was taken from the house, Keeners would sing a lament over the body. The practice of keening — where women would gather and wail in grief at an Irish funeral—died out in the mid 20th century. In the words of Richard Fitzpatrick, keening was “letting it all out, having a good scream, coming from the feet up, a good cry, a good purging.” Grief has since become suppressed in Western culture, as we strive for happiness, death and the sadness that follows, encroach too much upon our own sense of mortality to the point that it must be pushed to one side, “Our grief now is too contained. We rely on taking anti-depressants. We go to a grief counsellor” (Fitzpatrick). *Click here if you’re interested in learning more about the keening tradition and reading Richard Fitzpatrick’s article.
Yet, different cultures have preserved their own ways of dealing with death. In the not too distant country of Tanzania, the burial traditions of the Nyakyusa people initially focus on wailing, and are followed by feasts. They also require that participants dance and flirt at the funeral, confronting death with an affirmation of life.
The process of grieving is said to come in five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. However, these stages never come in order—sometimes in reverse and sometimes all at once—but within these stages are glimpses of fond memories, and deep love that seems to become stronger, and takes on a deep seat within us.
These images where recorded using a large format camera, and only one exposure at each of the location; they were all taken during the first year after my father’s passing. The process was both arduous and cathartic, I wanted to bring it up close, almost like at ‘the wake’, to expose the myriad of emotional landscapes I found myself in. Words themselves cannot express the emotions that arise during from grief; this collection of Landscapes is my Keen to my father.
