While all portraitists (especially photographers) work with the implicit knowledge that they are representing a moment in the life of a person who will invariably change and die, this book deals explicitly with how contemporary Australian photographers regard mortality. The time is ripe for such a study to be published: despite our ageing population and the increasing level of discussion on the topic, it must be said that, as a culture, we still don’t do death well. Most people dissimulate when the subject is mentioned. Few people die at home nowadays, so even the sight of the dead is now separate from our normal experience. And yet, as Ennis would acknowledge, ‘dying well’, or at least coming to peace with its reality, is a key part of ‘living well’.

Despite the inherently sombre nature of the topic, this is an uplifting book that does great credit to an under-researched aspect of Australian photographic practice. From Ennis’s opening personal story about her elderly friend Jean, the reader is in the company of a most thoughtful writer. This is writing in which firsthand experience is given as much weight as academic approaches, and this emphasis gives the book a direct and highly engaging quality. We are made part of the author’s evolving journey into understanding the visualisation of mortality through photography. In the process, we share the privilege of entering into an intimate relationship with images that can be almost painfully private.

One of Ennis’s central points is that, ‘when it comes to death, photography isn’t necessarily a separate activity carried out in isolation from everything else – it can be part of a whole range of life practices, of ritual’. We are introduced to some of the many photographic approaches to mortality that are apparent in three prime categories: death of self, death of the other, and reflections on mortality prompted by a person’s direct experiences of death. Death, as much as life, is an infinitely varied experience, and the uniqueness of the dying process is clearly apparent in the range of photographs chosen and how photographers choose to depict them.

The relationship of photography and mortality is a long one and is, some would argue, inherent to the nature of the medium. As Susan Sontag observed, ‘All photographs are memento mori’, and in the nineteenth century Australian photographers (like their international colleagues) quite literally capitalised on the medium’s inherent qualities by advertising ‘likenesses taken after death’. It is possible that post-mortem photographs were also taken in the twentieth century, but with changing attitudes to death such images rarely survive. Today, with digital cameras allowing people to print and circulate images in private, it appears that such photographs are again proliferating. As Ennis observes of her own experiences of this work: ‘[they] are like secrets, their existence known only to intimates.’

The sense of entering a space of intense privacy is perhaps most clearly apparent in the photographs by Jonathon Delacour, who captures moments in the lives of seriously ill newborns in an intensive care unit. The accompanying texts outlining the babies’ medical conditions and treatments are direct and shockingly raw. This photography, as Ennis notes, asks a great deal of the viewer as we are painfully drawn into a compassionate engagement with the successes and heartbreaking losses involved.

Equally moving, in a different way, are Craig Potton’s intimate photographs of his much-loved wife and artistic collaborator, Beverly. We are observers of her extended battle with an aggressive form of cancer, and of her eventual death. One of the most touching moments comes as father and son are shown standing in their dark formal suits as silent witnesses to Beverly, whose body is finally laid out behind them in death. The series could easily have been an unbearable intrusion, but, as a lovingly created collaboration, the camera is a poignant witness to the processes of death, loss and ultimately ongoing connection that the family experiences.

Painful emotion is an unavoidable aspect of considering this work, but many other responses are suggested as part of a subject that is, as Ennis illustrates, both rich and varied. Interestingly, the book deals only passingly with the spiritual aspects of death. Ennis acknowledges a ‘secular humanism’ in the attitude of many of the photographers, but beyond this the spiritual is scantly present. This is not to say that belief – whether in reincarnation or an afterlife – is not privately held, but its expression is generally discreetly expressed. It is perhaps in the non-descriptive ‘portraits’ of Olive Cotton and Michael Riley that one gets closest to an evocation of a life beyond the physical.

Cotton’s photograph Moths on a windowpane is one of the most inspiring images for me in the book. Taken late in her life, when Cotton fully recognised her time was nearly at its end, it suggests the cycle of life and death in the natural world in a way that is full of mystery, wisdom and acceptance. Under different circumstances, Michael Riley also produces photographs that have a sense of immanence. His series Cloud, taken near the end of his life, shows iconic symbols of Christianity and those of his indigenous culture floating in the sky in a way that is resonant with a belief in transcendence.

Through the inclusion of photographs such as these by Cotton and Riley, Reveries expands our notions of portraiture to include portraits in which the self is absorbed into the natural world, or which suggest a sense of universal consciousness. Ennis ends her study of photography and mortality at just this place by telling the story of a father who, grieving for his baby boy who had just died, took photographs of the night sky and rain-soaked sand. The father’s enigmatic images seem to touch the heart of the mystery that prompted Ennis’s study: in examining how we visualise our mortality, we also consider how we live our lives.