Renowned photographer Matthew Rolston has embarked on one of contemporary photography's most daring journeys with his series "Vanitas: The Palermo Portraits," venturing into the liminal space between the living and the dead. After decades of crafting images of pop culture icons, Rolston has completely reversed his visual approach to confront mortality itself through the mummified remains in Palermo's Capuchin Catacombs.
The subjects of this haunting series are photographed with the same meticulous care typically reserved for movie stars: dramatic lighting, frontal framing, and monumental prints. This intentional juxtaposition creates a fascinating dissonance where glamour photography meets inevitable bodily decay. The light that once glorified the living becomes what Rolston calls a "metaphysical scalpel" that reveals, dissects, and questions our relationship with mortality.
Rolston's technical precision approaches liturgical devotion, positioning his work within the lineage of Baroque Vanitas paintings while radically shifting the register from symbolic representations to tangible embodiments of time's passage. Rather than painted skulls, hourglasses, or wilted flowers, these are real faces that serve as living testimonies to human transience. The photographer restores dignity to these figures through his artistic intervention, creating not documentary work but existential theater.
The hypercontrolled aesthetic of the series—featuring triple exposure techniques, expressionist chromatism, and almost painterly textures—might seem incompatible with such raw subject matter. However, this tension between the stylist's distance and the mystic's intensity forms the project's core strength. Rolston walks a tightrope, risking spectacular failure with each image, yet never falling into mere sensationalism.
In an extensive interview, Rolston revealed his journey to the Capuchin Catacombs began with a desire to confront Western culture's problematic relationship with death—a reaction to years immersed in Hollywood's timeless beauty and inherent death denial. His odyssey took him first to the Czech Republic's Sedlec Ossuary, a chapel decorated with the remains of over 40,000 skeletons, but he found the "Bone Church" too architectural and impersonal, with humanity lost in the deconstruction.
This led him to seek Europe's famous "Jeweled Skeletons"—richly decorated remains of alleged Christian martyrs sent to churches across Europe by the Vatican in response to the Reformation. However, these beautifully adorned skeletons, locked behind glass coffins in inaccessible cathedral areas, proved practically impossible to light as he had envisioned.
Rolston finally discovered what he was seeking in the catacombs of Palermo's Church of Santa Maria della Pace in Sicily. Here were the preserved remains of important clergy and Palermo's elite, entombed in the crypt for nearly four centuries. He learned of these catacombs through Otto Dix's somewhat obscure watercolor series from the early 1920s, and upon seeing them firsthand, found them to be a macabre imitation of life—the perfect vessel for his ideas.
The mummies, with their tattered but still elaborate wardrobes (some lovingly updated to latest fashions by attentive relatives years after burial), presented distorted expressions that could be interpreted as emotion but were actually the result of gravity and decomposition. Rolston recognized this as humanity's innate impulse to project onto human simulacra, making this effect a crucial conceptual element of the project. Despite this understanding, he was profoundly moved by these figures, describing them as shocking and grotesque reminders of our ephemeral existence.
Rolston's artistic approach centers on what he calls the "unity of opposites"—the idea that contradictions are interconnected and mutually defining. This philosophy, combined with personal reflection on questions of meaning and existence, sparked the Vanitas series. The high-end Hollywood portraits that had nourished his previous photographic practice celebrated youth and beauty while openly denying death and decline.
By photographing his morbid, petrified subjects with the same level of stylized beauty and elegance typically applied to the living, Rolston explored multiple facets of these contradictions. The lighting itself was conceptual—an elevation of the grotesque to magnificence. His hope was that this extremely theatrical approach would create "cognitive dissonance" in viewers' minds, which under the right conditions can provoke powerful engagement.
Rolston describes his artistic and photographic approach to the Vanitas series as "neo-expressionist," aiming not to document but to create an emotionally rich reflection on the anguish of human transience and an interrogation of death's ultimate truth. He drew formal inspiration from Irving Penn's 1970s "Cigarettes" series, where Penn's sophisticated eye captured street debris with elegance, and Richard Avedon's later portraits, particularly the raw, impassive images of his dying father, Jacob Avedon.
Beyond photographic tradition, Rolston's primary visual influences came from painting, particularly the visceral figuration of Viennese and German Expressionists Egon Schiele and Otto Dix, Belgian pre-Expressionist James Ensor, and mid-20th century "neo-Expressionist" painters of the London School, notably Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. The series title "Vanitas" references the 17th-century Dutch still life genre associated with memento mori—works symbolizing the vanity and futility of earthly desires in the face of death's certainty.
Rolston's color choices were equally deliberate, seeking to create visual and thematic collision between beautiful and terrible, profane and divine, life and death. He employed what he calls "expressionist" lighting, combining three distinct wavelengths to create a painterly effect. The result was a spectrum of blues, sickly greens, deep purples, and dark magentas—a palette evoking bruises and suggesting a pulse of life beneath decomposition's surface.
The cyan-blush glow projected by his lighting onto the crypt's cracked, lime-covered walls was also inspired by the neon halo behind a Virgin Mary statue in a cave chapel—the sanctuary of Santa Rosalia (Palermo's patron saint) on Monte Pellegrino, another sacred site associated with death and remembrance. The dominant blue tones, particularly a shade called "Marian blue" with special significance in traditional Catholic dogma and display, aimed to imbue the images with qualities evoking both melancholy and transcendence.
Rolston's decision to present these works as unique pieces rather than reproducible photographs deliberately departs from photographic tradition. Treating these works as singular—like paintings rather than traditionally presented photographs—continues his formal strategy and influences while deepening the series' themes. This approach allows him to participate in what cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker called the "immortality project"—humanity's attempt to deny death by attributing permanence and meaning beyond flesh.
The monumental, richly colored Vanitas works are presented in patinated gold leaf frames, evoking and paying homage to Francis Bacon's paintings. The gold frame acts as a kind of "proscenium arch," accentuating the photographic style's highly theatrical character. Some works are arranged as triptychs in altarpiece style, designed as visual and symbolic collisions between sacred and mundane, youth and old age, beauty and grotesque.
Rolston obtained explicit permission from the Frati Cappuccini (Brothers of the Capuchin Order of Palermo) for artistic and historical purposes, making a significant donation to the Church for access. Interestingly, he understood this donation was not intended to preserve the mummies or crypt, but to serve the Order's primary mission: feeding, clothing, and providing medical assistance to their community's most needy members.
The photographer chose a "mostra diffusa" (distributed exhibition) across four Los Angeles venues rather than a single monolithic exhibition. This artistic choice reflected his belief that these large-scale, highly dramatic, and sometimes disturbing images work better when viewed sparingly. The approach also nods to art history traditions where singular works were presented in isolation.
The opening venue, ArtCenter College of Design in Pasadena, California—Rolston's alma mater—presents the most ambitious installation: a wall-mounted triptych in the spectacular vaulted space of the Mullin Transportation Design Center's Oculus, a former wind tunnel. The 16-foot-high, curved exhibition wall recalls the Guggenheim Museum's exhibition spaces, with its black-painted surface serving as a metaphor for the unknown's darkness.
Fahey/Klein Gallery, one of Los Angeles' oldest photographic exhibition spaces and Rolston's home gallery, offers a more comprehensive presentation with four individual works, each providing a singular experience isolated on a wall section. The Daido Moriyama Photo Foundation's intimate "Daido Star Space" presents works accessible only by appointment, while Leica Gallery Los Angeles provides a venue focused on photography's technical and material traditions.
Each venue offers different perceptual experiences to audiences as diverse as the locations themselves. From institutional academic settings to commercial galleries specializing in photography collecting, to intimate appointment-only spaces and technical photography celebrations, the distributed approach allows the work to be experienced across varied contexts.
Rolston emphasizes that mortality is humanity's most universal and intimate condition. Birth, life, and death are experiences we all share, with the great mystery of what comes after fueling countless generations' imaginations and creating elaborate mythologies, philosophies, and religions to protect us from fear of the unknown. His intention with Vanitas was no different from traditional vanitas paintings—using meditation on mortality as spiritual growth exercise toward living a more worthy life.
The accompanying monograph, published by Nazraeli Press, functions differently but connectedly to the exhibitions. While exhibitions present ten selected works at painting scale, the oversized book presents an extended series of fifty images. The volume contains various essays and texts, including Rolston's own intimate journal written during the series' creation, an introduction by New York Times photography critic Philip Gefter, a preface excerpted from cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker's foundational 1973 work "The Denial of Death," and Rolston's own afterword.
As Rolston receives a Lifetime Achievement Award, he finds it pertinent to present a project meditating on mortality while being recognized for his career's breadth—from Hollywood glamour to exploring various art theories in ongoing artistic projects. Vanitas represents his most elaborate and personal project to date, a culmination work attempting to demonstrate the knowledge, skills, and creative vision developed throughout his career. Beyond the photographs themselves, the lived experience of creating the Vanitas project has been more important to him than the final result or public reception.
