Germany #49 - Katatonie by Jack Burman
Germany #49 - Katatonie by Jack Burman
Interview with Jack Burman
Oct ’25
Dan E. mentioned you were an English professor. Arte Realizzata shared in their interview that you “Picked up a camera so the words could go through it and never appear again, or not as words.” Is that still the case? Or do you currently write as well? Would love to hear more about your personal experience on the difference between communicating through words versus photographs.
Words / images: massively different to say the obvious. Alien to each other in many ways though both enter through the eyes. I wanted the first but couldn’t get across. A camera was the bridge. It was all right because I still had Faulkner et al. to speak the words in my ear from time to time, as I shot film.
---and I use words to say this.
I can’t help but wonder about the meaning of preserving the colour in photographs. Why?
I use colour when what is in front of me asks for this. I use b&w in a similar way—i.e. where there is no ‘colour’ in front of me to speak of. Only layers of light and darkness. The first case is more common. The second however is easily as important when it occurs. E.g. see the attached image, which relates also to answer 6 below.
Before you travel to the site with the camera, what does your research process look like? Do you have a team or the whole journey has to be done in solitude to be intimate?
No team—until my son assisted me on the most recent, fairly long work trip (2025). It’s good to work alone when you’re inclined that way.
There are of course several ‘research’ processes. Varied and fairly extensive reading. Contacts with museum directors/med school doctors of anatomy etc. who offer tips and liaison with others. The internet. National Gallery of Canada officials who have generously supported my approaches to various sites, and cultural attachés in many Canadian embassies who have done the same. Private collectors who have graciously received a stranger into their homes. Recently a letter of introduction written by a generous Cardinal of the Catholic Church. My dentist’s contact with a medical faculty director of anatomy back in Argentina where she’d trained. Etc.
Aside from Mantegna and Peter Hujar, what are your other direct/indirect influences?
Caravaggio. Long the most important of all visual (in ‘still’, 2-dimensional form) artists to me. But also among painters Tintoretto and Chaim Soutine.
In ‘movie’ form, almost as important to me as Caravaggio—maybe as important, at last, now—the Hungarian director, Béla Tarr. The films Damnation, Satantango, The Turin Horse.
Still photographers: Frank, Arbus, Witkin, some Avedon.
Writers, as important to me as anyone listed above, probably more: Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, Shakespeare in the tragedies.
In the 2010 interview for CBC you shared how similar to writings of E. Dickinson, H. Melville, W. Faulkner, Shakespeare your intention is to show the extraordinariness of “non-events” and “non-narratives”. Could you expand on that?
(Like in the outstanding case with the catatonic inmate, I suspect knowing some of the story behind the image would strengthen or change the impression (?).
You may know of how Herman Melville worked on whaling vessels in the mid-19th century and then wrote a book about it, Moby-Dick. At one point in the story he comments on the contradictory nature of a harpooner’s difficult, often self-defeating method and function. It was the essential function of the entire complex industry: the killing function. Melville noticed how the harpooner needed to master a stance of total physical stillness—in a small chaseboat shaken by ocean swells and the whale’s desperation, the desperation of the mightiest animal on earth—in order to make a true killing throw. The greatest action, the greatest violence, Melville wrote, needed to arise out of the greatest stillness.
There is no simple benevolent logic in the images of The Dead but I hold to a claim like Melville’s: that the most powerful and violent action of meaning arises out of a woman or man or child in the stillness of death.
Wonder if you could describe again the story behind the catatonic crouch “tattoo request” and why you agreed to it? …maybe we could find the woman after all these years.
Here’s the page from my book scripta (2024) where opposite the image Germany #49 I transcribe the full email exchange:
Verbatim
[Ukraine] Thu, Sep 27, 2012 at 6:24 PM
Dear Jack,
This is rather random but the reason for this e-mail is to ask if it would be alright to possibly get one of your photos tattooed. More specifically it is the image of skeletal remains which I’ve seen labeled as Germany #49 (Catatonic Man), 2009. Whether that is actaully the name of the photo or not I’m not sure. I am not sure if I were to get it tattooed if it would be considered stealing your work or if it would be any form of copyright infringement. Any sort of response to this would be much appreicated.
Regards,
M.
[reply]
Dear M.
I’m not worried about copyright here, just respect for the darkness of this man’s life and end.
Can I trust your respect?
[Ukraine]
I hope my respect is trustworthy. One of the reasons I really liked this image was becuase for one, i’ve never seen remains presented in that sort of form, and there is just something about this photo that strikes me, althought i’m not sure I can fully explain why. Hopefully that makes sense. Also, I really appreicate your reply.
M.
[reply]
It makes sense.
In one of the previous interviews you’ve mentioned that the work you do is not intended to provoke thoughts of death (at least, it does not in you). What kind of thoughts does it elicit then?
In the short term, in all honesty: purely technical things which matter deeply to what I seek to make in the images: lens focal length, depth of field, reciprocity factor (film), histogram read-out (digital), light.
In the long term: that the images are simulacra—clear, hard, full—of each man or woman and my hands’ work, in time—from 500 years before, or from a few hours before—that is stopped, or at least slowed.
Again, compared to working in academia, in which ways is photography more fulfilling? Taking into account the subject matter and, as I assume, the fact that none of the work is for profit.
For me there is no deep connection between academia and the camera work I do. Or only tangential (which can matter somewhat). I’ve left academia but in those years I liked walking into rooms of young men and women just starting, in a sense, on their mature lives. Every year the same starting out.
A presence of green force or energy, even ‘dream’- seeking in some cases that I could recognize and draw from for my own otherwise separate camera work. A challenge to continue in the road at least some of them were entering with some of their rough purity and will.
And a few practical connections: e.g. drawing a salary that freed me entirely from commercial photography, which I found I was not suited to. And getting winters off for a number of years in a semestered system which let me travel abroad when it was summer in South America, a bit less hot in India or east Asia, when SS concentration camps in Polish winters were entirely empty of any visitors, etc.
Could you share more about the difficulties of getting behind closed doors?
In truth, I’ve tried to say all I can on this in answer #3, where you can tell from the list of methods that they typically require weeks/months/years (more often years than weeks) to come together in success.
The difficulties are many and various—as they should be in the work I do.
Do you practice photography often outside The Dead?
No. Never.
What are your thoughts on the tendency of museums and gallery spaces to cease keeping and exhibiting human remains? To what capacity did the movement influence the direction of your work?
Such pendulum-type currents and fashions in the art world/society-at-large are of course common and inevitable. I enjoyed the decades of relatively free[r] access to key institutional sites and important gallery spaces. It was great. But I’m fine with the pendulum swing. Nowadays far more private collectors reach out generously to share their collections of human remains, or place my work on their walls. I have more time to make books. If the work is true enough it will live beyond such pendulum swings in society.
I like the challenge, always have.
Would you mind sharing your favourite writers/poets/philosophers?
I’d be glad to. They’ve always meant a lot to what I do with cameras. I’ll omit philosophers since as a rule
I find that I cannot read them (but if Michel Foucault is a ‘philosopher’ he’s one that I read with pleasure).
For me the novel is the supreme form of prose writing. In answer #4 I mentioned the two novelists that for me tower over the rest—in their strongest books. With Faulkner the books are Absalom! Absalom!, As I Lay Dying, and The Sound and the Fury. With McCarthy it’s Blood Meridian. These four works are beyond all price for me.
As for poets: Emily Dickinson in the great poems (e.g. “After great pain, a formal feeling comes—“, “Because I could not stop for death—“, “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—“, “I started Early—Took my Dog—“, “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—“)
How did capturing the dead change you, if at all?
It didn’t. And doesn’t. Only deepens the need to (re-)make each next image of a woman or man or child in death. To place my work with the human body, however clearly rendered, on what W.G. Sebald called die undeutliche Grenze zur Transzendenz (“the indistinct borderline of transcendency”*).
*“Physicality is most strongly sculpted and its ‘nature’ most perceptible on the indistinct borderline with transcendency.”
Interview with Jack Burman
Oct ’25
Dan E. mentioned you were an English professor. Arte Realizzata shared in their interview that you “Picked up a camera so the words could go through it and never appear again, or not as words.” Is that still the case? Or do you currently write as well? Would love to hear more about your personal experience on the difference between communicating through words versus photographs.
Words / images: massively different to say the obvious. Alien to each other in many ways though both enter through the eyes. I wanted the first but couldn’t get across. A camera was the bridge. It was all right because I still had Faulkner et al. to speak the words in my ear from time to time, as I shot film.
---and I use words to say this.
I can’t help but wonder about the meaning of preserving the colour in photographs. Why?
I use colour when what is in front of me asks for this. I use b&w in a similar way—i.e. where there is no ‘colour’ in front of me to speak of. Only layers of light and darkness. The first case is more common. The second however is easily as important when it occurs. E.g. see the attached image, which relates also to answer 6 below.
Before you travel to the site with the camera, what does your research process look like? Do you have a team or the whole journey has to be done in solitude to be intimate?
No team—until my son assisted me on the most recent, fairly long work trip (2025). It’s good to work alone when you’re inclined that way.
There are of course several ‘research’ processes. Varied and fairly extensive reading. Contacts with museum directors/med school doctors of anatomy etc. who offer tips and liaison with others. The internet. National Gallery of Canada officials who have generously supported my approaches to various sites, and cultural attachés in many Canadian embassies who have done the same. Private collectors who have graciously received a stranger into their homes. Recently a letter of introduction written by a generous Cardinal of the Catholic Church. My dentist’s contact with a medical faculty director of anatomy back in Argentina where she’d trained. Etc.
Aside from Mantegna and Peter Hujar, what are your other direct/indirect influences?
Caravaggio. Long the most important of all visual (in ‘still’, 2-dimensional form) artists to me. But also among painters Tintoretto and Chaim Soutine.
In ‘movie’ form, almost as important to me as Caravaggio—maybe as important, at last, now—the Hungarian director, Béla Tarr. The films Damnation, Satantango, The Turin Horse.
Still photographers: Frank, Arbus, Witkin, some Avedon.
Writers, as important to me as anyone listed above, probably more: Faulkner, Cormac McCarthy, Shakespeare in the tragedies.
In the 2010 interview for CBC you shared how similar to writings of E. Dickinson, H. Melville, W. Faulkner, Shakespeare your intention is to show the extraordinariness of “non-events” and “non-narratives”. Could you expand on that?
(Like in the outstanding case with the catatonic inmate, I suspect knowing some of the story behind the image would strengthen or change the impression (?).
You may know of how Herman Melville worked on whaling vessels in the mid-19th century and then wrote a book about it, Moby-Dick. At one point in the story he comments on the contradictory nature of a harpooner’s difficult, often self-defeating method and function. It was the essential function of the entire complex industry: the killing function. Melville noticed how the harpooner needed to master a stance of total physical stillness—in a small chaseboat shaken by ocean swells and the whale’s desperation, the desperation of the mightiest animal on earth—in order to make a true killing throw. The greatest action, the greatest violence, Melville wrote, needed to arise out of the greatest stillness.
There is no simple benevolent logic in the images of The Dead but I hold to a claim like Melville’s: that the most powerful and violent action of meaning arises out of a woman or man or child in the stillness of death.
Wonder if you could describe again the story behind the catatonic crouch “tattoo request” and why you agreed to it? …maybe we could find the woman after all these years.
Here’s the page from my book scripta (2024) where opposite the image Germany #49 I transcribe the full email exchange:
Verbatim
[Ukraine] Thu, Sep 27, 2012 at 6:24 PM
Dear Jack,
This is rather random but the reason for this e-mail is to ask if it would be alright to possibly get one of your photos tattooed. More specifically it is the image of skeletal remains which I’ve seen labeled as Germany #49 (Catatonic Man), 2009. Whether that is actaully the name of the photo or not I’m not sure. I am not sure if I were to get it tattooed if it would be considered stealing your work or if it would be any form of copyright infringement. Any sort of response to this would be much appreicated.
Regards,
M.
[reply]
Dear M.
I’m not worried about copyright here, just respect for the darkness of this man’s life and end.
Can I trust your respect?
[Ukraine]
I hope my respect is trustworthy. One of the reasons I really liked this image was becuase for one, i’ve never seen remains presented in that sort of form, and there is just something about this photo that strikes me, althought i’m not sure I can fully explain why. Hopefully that makes sense. Also, I really appreicate your reply.
M.
[reply]
It makes sense.
In one of the previous interviews you’ve mentioned that the work you do is not intended to provoke thoughts of death (at least, it does not in you). What kind of thoughts does it elicit then?
In the short term, in all honesty: purely technical things which matter deeply to what I seek to make in the images: lens focal length, depth of field, reciprocity factor (film), histogram read-out (digital), light.
In the long term: that the images are simulacra—clear, hard, full—of each man or woman and my hands’ work, in time—from 500 years before, or from a few hours before—that is stopped, or at least slowed.
Again, compared to working in academia, in which ways is photography more fulfilling? Taking into account the subject matter and, as I assume, the fact that none of the work is for profit.
For me there is no deep connection between academia and the camera work I do. Or only tangential (which can matter somewhat). I’ve left academia but in those years I liked walking into rooms of young men and women just starting, in a sense, on their mature lives. Every year the same starting out.
A presence of green force or energy, even ‘dream’- seeking in some cases that I could recognize and draw from for my own otherwise separate camera work. A challenge to continue in the road at least some of them were entering with some of their rough purity and will.
And a few practical connections: e.g. drawing a salary that freed me entirely from commercial photography, which I found I was not suited to. And getting winters off for a number of years in a semestered system which let me travel abroad when it was summer in South America, a bit less hot in India or east Asia, when SS concentration camps in Polish winters were entirely empty of any visitors, etc.
Could you share more about the difficulties of getting behind closed doors?
In truth, I’ve tried to say all I can on this in answer #3, where you can tell from the list of methods that they typically require weeks/months/years (more often years than weeks) to come together in success.
The difficulties are many and various—as they should be in the work I do.
Do you practice photography often outside The Dead?
No. Never.
What are your thoughts on the tendency of museums and gallery spaces to cease keeping and exhibiting human remains? To what capacity did the movement influence the direction of your work?
Such pendulum-type currents and fashions in the art world/society-at-large are of course common and inevitable. I enjoyed the decades of relatively free[r] access to key institutional sites and important gallery spaces. It was great. But I’m fine with the pendulum swing. Nowadays far more private collectors reach out generously to share their collections of human remains, or place my work on their walls. I have more time to make books. If the work is true enough it will live beyond such pendulum swings in society.
I like the challenge, always have.
Would you mind sharing your favourite writers/poets/philosophers?
I’d be glad to. They’ve always meant a lot to what I do with cameras. I’ll omit philosophers since as a rule
I find that I cannot read them (but if Michel Foucault is a ‘philosopher’ he’s one that I read with pleasure).
For me the novel is the supreme form of prose writing. In answer #4 I mentioned the two novelists that for me tower over the rest—in their strongest books. With Faulkner the books are Absalom! Absalom!, As I Lay Dying, and The Sound and the Fury. With McCarthy it’s Blood Meridian. These four works are beyond all price for me.
As for poets: Emily Dickinson in the great poems (e.g. “After great pain, a formal feeling comes—“, “Because I could not stop for death—“, “I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—“, “I started Early—Took my Dog—“, “My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—“)
How did capturing the dead change you, if at all?
It didn’t. And doesn’t. Only deepens the need to (re-)make each next image of a woman or man or child in death. To place my work with the human body, however clearly rendered, on what W.G. Sebald called die undeutliche Grenze zur Transzendenz (“the indistinct borderline of transcendency”*).
*“Physicality is most strongly sculpted and its ‘nature’ most perceptible on the indistinct borderline with transcendency.”