To live forever is a choice any one of us can make. It’s a choice to do something worthy enough of being remembered, remembered as more than a handful of photographs in a shoebox, or, these days, a series of public tweets in the Library of Congress Twitter archive. The Internet may have changed the medium of immortality but the level of importance required to fully achieve it has been the same for as long as mankind has existed. From Socrates uttering sage words to Hitchcock changing the meaning of suspense through film, being immortalized as a household name can only be achieved by achieving the remarkable.
Sometimes remarkable people, through some misfortune or ultimate downward spiral, leave us too soon. We know there was more greatness left in them. More words. More films. More artworks. More triple platinum award winning albums. Whatever they had to offer, their departure is not just a loss for what they were but for what they could have been. What they should have been.
But as greatness leads to fame, so does fame lead to pressure. And pressure leads to the temptation to escape – to bury oneself in whatever takes the mind away from it all. That beckoning demon is hardest to resist when the world seems to relish in watching the great fall. And when they fall, we can only wonder about what we’ll miss; about what void will suddenly appear where their best and most inspiring work might have been.
This shoot by Remi Rebillard doesn’t shy away from the subject matter of highs and lows, of flames that burn too brightly and too quickly die. Like his previous work on the subject of suicide this shoot doesn’t glorify, either. It’s a reminder that youth and talent are fragile. When someone loses both it’s their tragedy; the void that’s left behind is ours.
To view the full shoot by Remi Rebillard (remirebillard.com) click on the thumbnails. Note that it’s NSFW.
