“Ad Infinitum” — A Photo Series by Kris Vervaeke

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In the crowded cemeteries of Hong Kong, row after row of tombstones mark the graves of the city’s dead, from the earliest Chinese immigrants to those who have only recently died. In the Asian tradition, many of these graves are marked by portraits of the person entombed beneath.

Battered by the elements and the passage of time, these fading portraits once displayed the countenance of a human being, vibrant and alive. Now, they are faded and worn, some of them into near-nothingness — abstract images that can no longer be connected to a face, a person or a human life. They serve as a perfect metaphor for the inescapable transition of flesh and bone to insubstantial dust.

These tombstone portraits from the Chung Yeung cemetery in Hong Kong are the subject of “Ad Infinitum” a photographic series displayed in Kris Vervaeke’s book of the same name. The aptly titled series contains over 1,000 photos — some of them still strikingly lifelike and detailed, others damaged to the point that only a tiny vestige of the original countenance remains. In the book, the photos are anonymous. Its pages contain no names, no stories, no points of reference — just photographs in various states of decay. In fact, the only text in the book is a single page written by the photographer, in which he says:

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“The portrait series in the book exposes both the strength of the individual face and the perishable nature of the individual human body…The clear images make us want to connect, understand, and know the strangers and their stories. The fading images reference mortality of human life, and the limitations of our impact…As the faces fade further, anonymity returns and once again we become part of nature…Ad infinitum.”

And, indeed, as one flips through the pages of Vervaeke’s book, the portraits seem to exist outside of time and space. Eerily beautiful…concrete yet otherworldly…they seem to speak to us from another dimension, silently sharing the most basic of all truths — that each of us, someday, will die, and the person we are will cease to exist. Yet at the same time, they also hint at the possibility of an afterlife — an existence in which we are distilled to our essence, no longer distinguishable from the vastness of the universe, but still present and, in some essential way, unchanged.

Kris Vervaeke – Ad Infinitum from Matej Sitar on Vimeo.