Max Kandhola has embarked on a remarkable photographic journey. In his extended series of photographs about the end of his father’s life, he has made a visual diary in which he has studied the smallest details of sickness and death. Nothing has escaped his concentrated gaze. It is rare for us, as viewers, to be given such access to such a private document. One can almost feel the silence and the stillness of the passage of time as Kandhola waits by his father’s bed, observing even the most tiny detail – a strand of hair, a speck of blood on a tissue, the imprint of a dead man’s face beneath a white sheet. This study is made all the more powerful by the fact that this was an institutional death, and all that should be private, surrounded by domestic objects in a domestic space, is coldly public. This intense personal drama is set on a stage inhabited by the machines and paraphernalia of the public hospital. By photographing his father in this intimate and inquiring way, Kandhola has perhaps fought a quiet yet determined battle to overwhelm this deeply impersonal space, to render his father private again.

The photographs in Illustration from Life were made by Kandhola during the last four hours of his father’s life, continuing through the moment of death and beyond. Writing about his work he remembers that “He passed away as I was taking the photographs. I did not realise that he had gone until the nurse placed her hand on my shoulder. I looked away from the camera’s viewfinder then around the room to find that it was now full of my family. From the silence of my camera’s viewpoint the atmosphere changed to that of mass hysteria. It would never be the same again. It seemed to me that at that moment all the things which separated his experience, ethos and background from mine manifested themselves in this room. What did he think of me, his son, who was recording his image? Did I have the knowledge and respect to do this, to allow everyone to see him in this way?”

Max Kandhola has been photographing his father since the early 1990s, “my relationship to him”‚ he remarks, “is seen through the camera.” Like the Danish photographer Krass Clement, whose portrait of the sickness and death of his mother (Ved Doden: About Death, 1990) was an unflinching documentary study of hospital death, Kandhola has used photography to make the usually invisible, visible. But while Clement used black and white reportage to document the death of his mother, Kandhola employs rich colour – dwelling on fragments, fleeting moments, the impressions made by light and shadow. These are truly beautiful pictures, in which each part of the body is approached with veneration. Even the soiled materials of disease – the bloody tissue, the skin bruised red – assume a kind of holiness, and one is reminded of the sacred relics of saints.

Photography, powerful as it is, can only say so much, and this visual project is given added strength by Kandhola’s own compelling written memoir, in which smell and sound lend their own particular significance to this unfolding drama. During his father’s illness, Kandhola collected “…fragments and debris from my father, samples in the form of dry and liquid blood, hair, urine from his colostomy bag, body impressions on fabric that I collected for one year during his chemotherapy treatment, and finally ash from his cremation. I will never forget the smell from his body, from the endless treatment of drugs. It came from his hair and clothes. I still have fragments of his fine hair in small bags in my studio, and the smell of cancer and chemotherapy is still within the samples.” In this memoir, Kandhola remembers the heat of summer, the breeze which passed across the hospital beds, the silence during blood transfusions. Such memories, allied with the richness and power of the photographs, have the potency and resonance of some monumental history.

Max Kandhola’s photographs of his father pose inevitable, but nonetheless important, questions about photography’s boundaries and taboos. In Kandhola’s clear, serious and dignified documentation of his father’s passing, one can define the boundaries which Kandhola himself set, aware, as he is, of the dangers inherent in photographic documentation. Kandhola has constructed a narrative, which is far beyond the document – a rich landscape of fragmentation, surface and a carefully controlled grieving.

Images previewed from Illustration of Life published by Dewi Lewis Publishing.