Four Deaths (2004)

This work is based on John Hilliard's piece from 1974 entitled Cause of Death? Hilliard showed the same image cropped in four different ways in four different photographs, each with the printed titles CRUSHED/BURNED/DROWNED/FELL. This questioned the validity of explanatory captions given to photographs in the context of newspaper reports, while the shrouded body itself alludes to the images themselves. By very simply montaging all four images together, I was able to reconstruct as much as was possible of the original scene, before the image was cropped, and a by product of this was the formation of a square cross, with all its attendant medical connotations.

©copyright 2005 Nicholas Middleton