Shane Balkowitsch, No Vaccine For Death

"No Vaccine For Death, a Tableaux Vivant, a wet plate collaboration, July 17th, 2021. This collaboration was inspired by the painting at the Musee de Prado in Spain "The Triumph of Death" by Pieter Bruegel from 1562. This wet plate shoot could not have come at a more poignant time in history. The world is just starting to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. Marek my director and I thought that if we could immortalize this scene in our own way that we could possibly put this behind us. Marek chose the title for the production and his thoughts are below. His feelings are that we are all going to eventually die and we focus so much time and energy on things that are not important, we loose track of our time here on Earth. There is no vaccine for mortality and he wanted to make people more aware of this fact.

"In regards to theme - one things that I’ve been think a lot about is how afraid of death our society has become. The idea that we will live forever and pain and suffering should be avoided at all costs has created a lot of problems in our time. The pandemic brings the possibility of death closer to us, but death is the real pandemic - and there will be no vaccine for that - we will all die." “No Vaccine for Death” might be an interesting title..." - Marek Dojs, May 31, 2020

Ninety collaborators came together for no other reason than to create this image together. It was our day in the sun.

I want to thank each and every person that contributed to this fabulous adventure. I am so blessed to be on this creative path with all of you. I want to sincerely thank Monsignor Shea from the University of Mary for allowing us to use the sacred Marian Grotto as our backdrop and set. Marek is a professor at the University and Karel Sovak the Dean played the Grim Reaper with the sickle in the center of the frame. Numerous students from the University also woke up early on a Saturday to join us, which made the collaboration even more meaningful.

Carl Zeiss Tessar 300mm lens, Alessandro Gibellini studio camera, f11, 1 seconds of exposure, 8x10" black glass ambrotype in the historic wet plate process of pure silver on glass. The original plate (plate #3963) is being donated to the State Historical Society of North Dakota to be preserved along with a formal list of everyone involved.

This is the 5th large collaboration that Marek and I have worked on together. Every time we start a new project it seems we get more ambitious and push the envelope of what is possible.

Shane Balkowitsch, Resident Ambrotypist

PS: I also want to thank Herbert Ascherman, Jr., Catherine Segura, John Moore and James Kyle for traveling thousands of miles from out of state to be a part of this collaboration.

The painting shows a panorama of an army of skeletons wreaking havoc across a blackened, desolate landscape. Fires burn in the distance, and the sea is littered with shipwrecks.^[3] A few leafless trees stud hills otherwise bare of vegetation; fish lie rotting on the shores of a corpse-choked pond. Art historian James Snyder emphasizes the "scorched, barren earth, devoid of any life as far as the eye can see."^[1] In this setting, legions of skeletons advance on the living, who either flee in terror or try in vain to fight back. In the foreground, skeletons haul a wagon full of skulls; in the upper left corner, others ring the bell that signifies the death knell of the world. People are herded into a coffin-shaped trap decorated with crosses, while a skeleton on horseback kills people with a scythe. The painting depicts people of different social backgrounds – from peasants and soldiers to nobles as well as a king and a cardinal – being taken by death indiscriminately.^[4]