Exhibitions

Paul Schatzberger-
Doctors and dying

18th March - 7th April 2006

Doctors and Dying is a series of evocative and honest reminiscences.

The content of Paul Schatzberger's exhibition deals with one of the most resilient taboos in our society. The highly individual process of death is thoughtfully and sensitively addressed. Unusually, it is the medical context that is shown to work both within and outside of this process. The combination of overtly personal and professional spaces works to highlight aspects of the individual’s mortality within a wider social context.

The incurable is a prolific and dramatically personal concept that is familiar to many of us. Where life and death are so dependent on each other as opposing realities, an exhibition about death must also be about life.

Schatzberger, a GP, first shows us an out of date medical space – 25 years old and already archiving itself. It’s not that doom and gloom rule necessarily, but snapped political statements, memories of the Thatcher era, a 1980s NHS are captured here. We are taken to sit at a desk facing the door through which patients will come and go – taken past reception with its rows and rows of notes exemplifying the multitude of ailments and our medical records, pre computer generation. We’re left looking out a window – itself a carefully preserved relic of yet another time – at the changing bulldozed landscape. The passing of professional time that deals with a complex matrix of individuals and their case histories, shown in the mass of patient notes, the politics of the NHS.

As a society we demand cure and/or pain relief. We prescribe and we are prescribed for. The doctor enters our homes – or we enter medical space ourselves. There is no cure for old age or terminal illness, so we come to deal with and assess the alleviation of pain and how best to do so.

It is within this context that Schatzberger chooses to document the process of dying and to demonstrate its relationship with this medical sphere – a relationship that might operate both within and outside of it.

Paul Schatzberger and Michael Willson, an acquaintance with terminal cancer, embarked upon a photographic documentary project that allows for this process and relationship to be recorded. In its realism and honesty, we are confronted with the transience of a moment and the long lasting existence of the photograph after the subject has gone. We see a very literal demonstration of the durability of the photograph and its use as a legacy.

What is offered is not blind panic, or sudden and unexplained detachment – but a conscious process of very personal documentation over a period of diminishing time. What is left seems calm, familiar, dignified absence.

"The effort has been to “compose the last movement of your sonata. But this is an activity that requires attention, which in turn requires objects, thoughts, and images to carry it.” Michael Willson

Other Artist information: Paul Schatzberger's website