Obituaries to Prayer Flags

In honor of those who died on 9/11, I hand copied the victims’ obituaries using black ink on sheets of white vellum. I strung the papers together and hung them in rows across the stream in my backyard in upstate New York.

As time passed and the words disappeared the papers began to resemble Tibetan prayer flags, visual reminders of prayer. When left to sway in the wind, each snap and flutter became an utterance of prayer. As I photographed the obituaries for a year I witnessed the obituaries becoming prayer flags.