America in the '50s was a time of consumer optimism. The post-war economy was booming and in addition to brand-new tract houses and shiny state-of-the-art appliances the popularity of a more opulent burial style was also on the rise.
Instead of being buried in the ground, American consumers where choosing to have their remains eternally enshrined in polished beds of marble at public mausoleums.
"In life and death a new type of luxury could be afforded," says Chicago-based photographer John Faier, whose series Queen Of Heaven trains a cinematic lens on these lavish resting places. "The average American could afford these things and could now play in a world where design and status were important."
Mausoleums, or tombs above ground, have been around for millennia. One of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World is the Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. Mausoleums in the United States were around before the war but were normally private and reserved for the rich.
Like the mausoleums built for kings, queens, and heads of state, the tombs of the 1950s were often extravagant. But they were also uniquely contemporary, Faier says, and borrowed from the kind of design that dominated the times.
"Bright colors, matching upholstery, matching lamp shades — the architecture reminds us more of a cocktail lounger or hotel, not of a mausoleum," says Faier, who scoped out seven mausoleums in Chicago and others in suburban New York and Los Angeles. "The peculiar mix of modernism and death reflects the things most kitsch, troubling, and beautiful about our modern culture."
Faier says he stumbled into the story in 2006 when he was touring the polychromatic corridors of Chicago's community mausoleum, Queen of Heaven, hours before hopping continents for an assignment in Japan.
"The only thing I could think about on the 16-hour flight to Osaka was Queen of Heaven and its eerie beauty. When I returned I began to research and scout other candidates built during the same time period," he says.
Gripped not only by the architecture, interior order, and soft furnishings but also by the unique color and light within a certain batch of mid-1950s mausoleums, which he describes as simultaneously saccharin and somber, Faier launched a 5-year photo odyssey of the ostentatious corpse vaults.
Mausoleum complexes can be huge and have provided Faier with a lot of material. For example, the Queen of Heaven mausoleum — adorned with stained glass, mosaics, wood, marble and bronze statues — has a capacity for 33,000 bodies. Currently it's only three-quarters full.
Day-to-day, Faier is a commercial and architectural photographer and he's known for paying close attention to color and composition, both of which became an important part of the mausoleums project.
"Color is such an important affective component that it drives mood and an experiential response to a photo," he says. "Even if you have never been to this place [the color helps] you get it immediately."
But even the most creative use of color and composition can't describe the sweet smell that "lingers on the palette after you leave," Faier says.
"Mausoleums do not smell like hospitals. Hospitals smell of antiseptics, sickness, and bodily fluids. This is different," he says. "I guess it is a smell of death. I was recently in someone's new car and it was the closest smell to that of these mausoleums — it might have something to do with the compounds used in the plastics like styrene and benzene or the use of formaldehyde in the manufacturing of cars."
In addition to the smell, Faier says mausoleums are abuzz with fruit flies.
"They are everywhere. They're not particularly bothersome; they are just there," he says.
Death is understandably a difficult and sometimes squeamish subject for many people but Faier has not encountered any negative response to Queen Of Heaven.
"Most often, people tell me the images are haunting and beautiful," he says.
Some visitors to Faier's recent exhibition at the Chicago Cultural Center even told him that due to his photographs, they were considering a mausoleum for their final resting place.
The only problem with that decision, he says, is that choosing to be buried in a mausoleum might foretell a lonely afterlife. During his six years of shooting he never once encountered a person mourning a loved one.
"Isn't that odd?" he says. "So much effort was placed into creating these opulent spaces yet, at the end of the day, the loved ones stay away and those buried in these spaces are forgotten."
All Photos: John Faier
Geek's Guide to the Galaxy 19 Sep, 2012
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