1990-1995

50, 8x10 Gelatin Silver Contact Prints

I’ve had my grandfather’s picture with me for a long time now. My mother gave it to me one day, thrusting it into my arms, then asking if it was something I would like to have. She told me her father had come to her in a dream the night before, and mentioned the portrait. What I saw was a head-and-shoulders photograph of someone I had never known. Made in the formal manner of the day at Henderson’s Studio in downtown Detroit, the image recorded a serious man with a hint of a kindly smile.

It was one of the few things I had of Ed’s, that and his ivy-patterned cup — a giant ceramic thing that held a lake of coffee —saucer to match. The picture, the cup, and then something else: his licenses, yellowing in their sagging frames.

In 1929, the Michigan Department of Health granted Edward Joseph Sweeney a mortician’s license and embalmer’s license. When Ed died, my grandmother, Anne Marie Sweeney, then in her 40’s, returned to school for a mortuary science degree that would allow her to run the family business. It wasn’t long before she was elected the first woman president of the Michigan Funeral Directors’ Association.

Years later I wondered about the E.J. Sweeney funeral home and contacted the current owner with a request to photograph. He graciously invited me in, and we shot in the old embalming room in Detroit. And so began a long and perhaps unique photographic quest into the funeral business that continued in Chicago while I studied for a Master’s Degree, and subsequently in the years beyond.

To most of us, the business of death is indeed in the shadows. Death touches us all. We attend funerals and visit the cemetery. Love, loss and the grief of parting are the most human of all emotions. But we never dwell on the business of death itself. We don’t talk about it. We hope we never need it. With all its Hollywood trappings of foggy graveyards and ghostly apparitions, it remains a mystery.

I met many families in the funeral business. Just as mine was in the forgotten past. Husbands, wives, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters, perhaps drawn by temperament or a need to serve. News of my project spread, and they welcomed me in. It was as if they wanted to assure me there is no mystery. Theirs is a simple function: to escort the body on its final journey to the grave. In religious terms, a “corporal work of mercy,” a mandate of kindness: “To bury the dead.”

And so I see across the generations to my grandfather, and I look at the images my lens captured and wonder what he would see. I’ll never know, of course. And I’m not sure of all that I myself saw. In the way the photographs came together, in the nanosecond it takes to capture an image on film, there arises a certain spirituality, an otherworldliness if you will, most of which is unintended.

—Marco Lorenzetti