Vitreous Humour

The vitreous humour is the aqueous fluid contained within the interstices of the vitreous body located behind the retina of an eye. Vitreous (resembling glass in color, composition, brittleness, or luster) materials, as we know, are also liquid. The older glass becomes the more distorted it gets. “Humour” in medieval physiological theory, meant one of the four fluids of the body that were thought to determine a person’s temperament and features.

In the seminal scene of Bunuel and Dali’s silent film from 1929, Un Chien Andalou, a straight razor slices through an eye and the viscous vitreous humour pours out. We commonly think of the human eye as a solid membrane between the lifeless external world around us and our inner individual consciousness. To many, it is the window to the soul.

If the soul is behind the eye, what happens to the soul when the body dies? The film Un Chien Andalou survives in a decayed form, but it’s actors and creators have died. The body ages and dies. The eye loses the spark of consciousness.

The photographs in this series are an experiment in inverting the “window to the soul” idea. Instead of peering out of an eye to arrive at subjective perception or peering into a living eye to perceive the soul, the camera is peering through decayed glass windows into locked and abandoned crypts. These empty structures, thought to contain no living consciousness, daily experience light moving and refracting through their windows, giving the resemblance of life. All photographs were taken at Cypress Lawn Cemetery in Colma, California.