“Terminal” Show at Photo Center NW

Until April 5 at Photographic Center NW in Seattle

This show includes photographs from a lot of big name photographers.  The signature photograph, in addition to the piece hung in the gallery, is presented in a translucent wrap on the large show windows facing on 12^th Avenue.  It is of a woman lying in a hospital bed looking directly at the camera.  Clearly in great distress, she is the photographer, Eugene Richards’, wife who shortly after the photograph was taken died of metastatic cancer.  The title is “The Last Chemo Treatment”.

I would not for a moment claim that Mr. Richards or any of the other photographers whose work is in the show should not have taken the photographs.  Nor would I claim for a moment that curator and PCNW director Michelle Dunn Marsh should not have conceived of this show or curated it.

However, I can confidently claim that I would not have done so.

 

“At the moment of love and the moment of death we should turn our heads.” 

-- Henri Cartier-Bresson

 

Yep.