Around a dozen years ago, my aunt Zoņa passed away. At the time, I had recently started to take photos and was infatuated with the great photographers of the Magnum photo agency – mostly men of French, Jewish and Anglo-Saxon origin, who created photographic stories under the aegis of the agency, which was established in 1947, documenting life and conflicts across the world. Magnum photographers arrived at the scene as neutral observers in order to see the dramas of others through their lenses, then got their planes, returned to Paris and analyzed the collected shots, looking for the most successful compositions. I was consumed by the idea that my mission likewise was to document as objectively as possible life as it is. Armed with a 35mm camera and a few black-and-white Ilford films, I went to the funeral, thinking about how Cartier-Bresson might have seen it.

It was freezing, there was snow on the ground, and the farmstead where Zoņa had lived could not be reached by car. The priest and people who wanted to pay their respects arrived at the farmstead. Then the coffin and all the funeral wreaths were brought outdoors. The procession started its journey to the graveyard. To deliver the coffin, it was first carried by hand, then placed on a sledge drawn by a horse. Having covered the more remote part of the journey in this manner, the procession arrived at a place reachable by car, where a minivan was already waiting. The coffin was lifted into the van and brought to the graveyard. This was followed by the traditional Catholic funeral rite, with the reading of prayers, the singing of psalms, the last words, the digging of the grave, the covering of the coffin with soil, the laying of flowers and wreaths on the fresh grave, and taking a group photo of the relatives. A symbolic funeral meal took place in the car park next to the graveyard, where the departed was remembered by eating pasties and drinking a glass of spirits.

The enumeration of activities constituting the funeral rite has the air of dry anthropological research, analyzing the actions performed by people in a specific culture to bid farewell to the departed and to bring order to the world in which those who remain will continue to live. Now it seems that participation in Zoņa's funeral while assuming the cold, analytic gaze of a neutral observer instead of the role of an involved relative was my way of rising above the gloom and temporarily pushing away the grief. And, despite having no office in Paris, I decided that I could print these photographs right here at the photo laboratory RTJN ANNAS 2.

Vika Eksta (LV) is a visual artist and pedagogue from Latvia. Vika's works mostly concentrate on personal experience and existential subjects, such as aging, relationships, gender and social roles as well as life in the Latvian countryside. Vika works in photography (including analogue), video, performance for camera and audio-visual archive research. Vika is the recipient of ADC Young Guns, FK Portfolio and the Prize for Young Baltic Photographers at the first Riga Photography Biennial and was nominated for the Purvītis Prize. Since 2014, she has taken part in exhibitions in Latvia and abroad, and worked in pedagogy of photography. Her works are in the collections of the Latvian National Museum of Art, Latvian Museum of Photography, VV Foundation, SEB banka as well as private collections in Europe and the USA.



Participant and text author: Vika Eksta (LV)
Curator: Astrīda Riņķe (LV)
Image: Vika Eksta, from the series ‘Funeral in Sloboda’, 2011–2025