There is the Day of the Dead that tourists see, and there is the Day of
the Dead that is a lived ritual and a fact of life in Mexico--and it is
the latter that the Spanish photojournalist Tomas Casademunt sets out to
document in Death on the Altar. Casademunt's approach to this
often misunderstood subject focuses on the altars that families assemble
to remember and mourn the dead (rather than addressing any activity
that attends them), and consequently his images are as humble and
generous as the gestures they depict. Many of the shots of these
domestic altars are frontal views, for Casademunt never attempts the
spectacular shot, nor does he labor to insert himself into the tale.
Like an ethnologist, he records a testimony without adding pictorial
layers of sentiment or undue piety, so that what we get are intimate,
ordinary atmospheres in which the sense of lived ritual is palpable and
approachable and into which the viewer's intrusion is minimal. After
seven years of explorations in villages in the states of Morelos,
Michoacan, Oaxaca, Yucatan, Tlaxcala, Puebla and Guerrero, Tomas
Casademunt has produced a group of photographs of great beauty and
scale.