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 Weber State University
A story of love, death, and photographic meaning.
When Matt Glass started taking pictures, he was deeply dissatisfied with the results. “I had a hard time finding subjects that piqued my interest,” he says. “I didn’t find any joy in shooting landscapes, and I was too shy to photograph people on the street.” What led Glass to create his first successful photos was the realization “that people often look so deep into the meaning of artwork that they forget to really look at the artwork itself.”
After that epiphany the photographer set about creating images that would require no interpretation. One was titled “Man in a Field Holding a Leg.” “It was exactly that,” says Glass, a junior at Weber State University, in Ogden, Utah, where his teachers have included Drex Brooks and Susan Barratt. “That’s all it was.”
For Glass, the meaning came later. “I’d always been interested in movies and filmmaking, and I became aware of the work of Gregory Crewdson and Charlie White,” he explains. “So I began to add a narrative, cinematic feel to my photographs.” The images shown here are part of a series called Memento Mori, a sly reference to the 19th-century custom of taking photographs of people after death.
“The idea of the series is that the photograph is taken the moment after a person dies, as they leave their body,” says Glass, who shoots digitally, by existing light, and usually combines two or three separate exposures in Photoshop to create the final result. “Some of the images are calm and serene, and others are violent and angry. It’s my way of exploring the various emotions people feel toward death.”
—Russell Hart
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