Some stories can’t be told in straight lines or vivid declarations—they are whispered in texture, embedded in stillness, and remembered through the intangible. Death and Other Belongings, a quietly haunting photobook by British visual artist Will Green, is one such story. Rooted in personal loss during the Covid-19 pandemic, this collection speaks a universal language of grief, transience, and the fragility of everyday life.
In a period marked by isolation and global uncertainty, Green's experience became tragically emblematic. After losing both parents to the virus within the same week, he turned to the familiar act of image-making as a means not to memorialize but to survive. His work doesn’t offer comforting closure—it lingers in unresolved moments, in shadows and still objects, in the haunting aftermath of presence.
The photographs are not portraits in the conventional sense. Instead, they present what’s left behind: a worn chair with the trace of a seated figure, sheets hanging like veils on a clothesline, a solitary wasp buzzing against a window pane. These fragments conjure a deep sense of absence, anchoring the viewer in a world reshaped by loss.
Yet, this deeply introspective work moves beyond individual sorrow. It reverberates with the collective trauma that defined the early years of the pandemic, making Green’s personal archive feel strangely familiar to anyone who lived through that time.
The Genesis of a Visual Testimony
The early days of the COVID-19 pandemic were marked by a collective descent into uncertainty. For many, it was a time of sudden rupture—a severing of routines, relationships, and a sense of safety. For British visual artist Will Green, the rupture became deeply personal and irreversible. In the span of just a few days, he lost both of his parents to the virus. The emotional fallout from such a devastating loss unfolded against a backdrop of global chaos, strict isolation, and profound physical illness. Green himself contracted COVID-19 around the same time, and his symptoms lingered for months, developing into long-Covid and further blurring the boundary between grief and physical suffering.
In this state of emotional and bodily depletion, Green did not set out to create a work of art. There was no ambition for a polished series or long-term project. Instead, he reached for his camera as an instinctive response—a way to steady himself amid the freefall. The act of capturing small, quiet scenes became an anchor, a means of staying connected to a world that was rapidly shifting underfoot. His immediate surroundings—a garden chair, a pane of glass, the texture of fabric—suddenly carried the weight of memory, absence, and an eerie unfamiliarity.
The process began without structure or intention. There was no storyboard, no visual outline, no fixed message. Yet as the days turned to weeks and the months wore on, a pattern began to emerge. Certain themes repeated themselves—emptiness, fragility, stillness, decay. Without consciously deciding to do so, Green was visually mapping his own grief. The emotional landscape of mourning—its spirals, regressions, and occasional clarity—was embedded in each frame. The camera, a neutral observer at first, had become a medium of emotional processing.
Grief in Fragments: The Evolution of Meaning
The early images in what would later become Death and Other Belongings are fragmented, intimate, and quiet. They don’t scream or demand interpretation. Instead, they whisper. A garden chair, slightly indented. A dead insect trapped against the light. A discarded piece of clothing, half-hidden in the frame. These aren’t grand gestures; they are emotional fragments, delicate and unsettling, that speak volumes without language. Each photograph holds a dual meaning—what is seen, and what is felt. And often, what is felt carries far more weight.
Green’s photographs began to reflect his emotional progression, albeit in an abstract way. The stages of grief, often described clinically as denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, were not documented in any linear fashion. But their emotional textures appeared in visual metaphors. Anger manifested in images of destruction or abandonment. Depression surfaced in muted light and blurred movement. Acceptance, when it arrived, took the form of clarity in composition or gentle, melancholy stillness. The camera became a mirror, reflecting not how things were, but how they felt.
During this period, the act of photography offered Green a certain form of psychological agency. While so much was out of his control—his health, his emotions, the global pandemic—this creative outlet gave structure to the chaos. The physical acts of loading film, composing a shot, and processing negatives were grounding. They provided tactile reassurance that something tangible could still be shaped from the intangible wreckage of grief.
As weeks passed, Green amassed dozens of images. Though unstructured at the time, these images collectively began forming a vocabulary—a visual grammar of loss. He had, without realizing it, created an emotional archive. The everyday had transformed into elegy.
A Turning Point: From Private Archive to Public Offering
It wasn’t until 2023, several years into the grieving process, that Green began to consider the work in a more public context. He enrolled in a workshop hosted by Magnum Photos, a formative experience that introduced him to mentors and peers who would help reframe how he viewed his project. Among them was Stu Smith, founder of GOST Books, known for publishing emotionally resonant and conceptually rich photobooks.
When Green shared early prints from the series, the reception was immediate and powerful. The photographs’ quiet strength and emotional complexity struck a chord. Smith saw not just images, but a narrative—a meditation on loss that was both intimate and collectively understood. The story wasn’t limited to one man’s grief; it echoed the emotional terrain navigated by millions who had lost loved ones during the pandemic, often in isolation, without ritual or resolution.
That moment shifted the project from a private record into a public expression. It marked the conceptual birth of Death and Other Belongings as a book—not as a retrospective or visual anthology, but as a living, breathing document of emotional survival. From this point forward, Green worked more consciously, not to edit his grief into neat chapters, but to give it form. He began curating his images, considering sequence, flow, and the interplay of silence and sound that each frame suggested.
The book would ultimately feature not only images but also sparse, poignant text. This included a powerful excerpt describing his final visit to his parents, as well as a historical inclusion: the first ProMed email alert about the unknown virus emerging in Wuhan. This subtle but deliberate juxtaposition—private memory and public notice—underscored the dual reality of the pandemic. Every personal tragedy was also a piece of a global mosaic.
Emotional Resonance as Narrative Form
What makes Death and Other Belongings a singular achievement is not just its subject matter, but its refusal to follow a conventional structure. The work does not attempt to narrate grief in linear terms. It does not offer answers, redemption arcs, or visual platitudes. Instead, it honors complexity. The images are quiet but piercing, tender but unrelenting. They are intimate without being invasive, and universal without losing their specificity.
Green’s refusal to sensationalize his story allows space for viewers to bring their own emotions into the frame. In this way, the book becomes not only a record of one man’s sorrow but also an open invitation to reflect, remember, and grieve. The absence of direct portraiture or explanatory captions ensures the work never drifts into sentimentality. Rather than telling viewers what to feel, it gives them the room to feel for themselves.
The emotional honesty of the work is matched by its aesthetic restraint. Many of the photographs were shot in confined domestic spaces, using makeshift darkroom setups. Imperfections—light leaks, dust, scratches—were not corrected but embraced. They lend the images a tactile immediacy, reinforcing the idea that grief is not clean or controllable. It stains, it clings, it warps what was once familiar. Green’s willingness to let these flaws remain speaks to the authenticity that defines every aspect of the project.
Ultimately, Death and Other Belongings is more than a book. It is a testament to how creativity can emerge from despair, how visual storytelling can hold space for trauma, and how personal truth can resonate far beyond its origin. The genesis of this project may have been unintentional, but its evolution into a deeply moving and universally resonant work is a powerful reminder of the transformative potential of art made in honest response to suffering.
Whether viewed as a document of the pandemic, a meditation on mortality, or a poetic exploration of absence, Green’s work stands as a quiet monument to resilience and remembrance. It reminds us that even in isolation, grief is never truly solitary—and that from the most fragmented beginnings, something meaningful can still be built.
Turning Points in Visual Consciousness
There are often subtle yet pivotal moments when an artist transitions from spontaneous creation to intentional narrative-making. For Will Green, that inflection point was quietly profound. As his project—Death and Other Belongings—began to take form, two particular images emerged as milestones. These photographs not only shifted his process but reshaped how he understood grief, memory, and the potential of visual storytelling.
The first image is a deeply vulnerable self-portrait. His chest is bare, punctuated with the adhesive remnants of ECG monitors—a record of his hospitalization during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic. At a time when medical care was overwhelmed, Green had been placed in a triage ward, isolated from traditional emergency rooms. The image is haunting in its stillness. It doesn’t dramatize pain; instead, it offers an unfiltered glimpse into the corporeal and psychological toll of illness. The body becomes both subject and symbol—a canvas marked by survival, exhaustion, and fragility.
The second image holds even greater emotional complexity. Captured quietly at his parents’ joint funeral, it shows two wicker coffins resting side by side. The composition is understated, yet devastating. In taking the photograph, Green confronted a moment that many might find unthinkable to document. It wasn’t about capturing a memory—it was about acknowledging finality. The scene is dignified, silent, and yet full of an invisible ache. For Green, it was not just a farewell; it marked the beginning of a deeper inquiry into how images could hold unresolved emotions and give shape to what words so often fail to articulate.
From Witnessing to Weaving Meaning
After those two formative photographs, Green’s perspective shifted. What had begun as a reactive attempt to endure grief slowly evolved into a cohesive and intuitive exploration. He began to notice connections between previously unrelated frames—a sagging chair echoed the curve of a grieving back; reflections in windows hinted at ghostly presences; discarded garments carried the silhouettes of those who no longer wore them.
He started to photograph with greater awareness of sequence and atmosphere. Instead of collecting isolated images, he began to explore how each image informed the next—how visual rhythms could evoke psychological states. Tension and unease became recurring elements, not as cinematic effects but as honest reflections of internal unrest. There was a growing awareness of time: not chronological time, but emotional time, where minutes can stretch or collapse depending on the weight of what they contain.
This movement toward narrative consciousness wasn’t about control; it was about attentiveness. Green allowed the work to grow organically while remaining alert to what the photographs were communicating back to him. It was no longer just about what he was seeing, but how he was feeling as he framed each moment. In doing so, his visual language matured, gaining depth, ambiguity, and resonance.
His images increasingly became charged with a suspended sense of presence. There was a pervading silence in his compositions—an awareness of what had been removed or had disappeared. Each photograph stood not as a conclusion but as a question, inviting the viewer to linger in the uncomfortable space between memory and erasure. The absence of direct portraiture intensified this emotional ambiguity, forcing the viewer to engage with the physical and metaphorical voids left in the wake of his parents’ passing.
Visual Dread and Emotional Static
As the project developed, a consistent undertone of atmospheric tension emerged. Even in images that seemed still or serene, there was an unmistakable unease. The emotional palette of the work became increasingly textured—not just sadness or longing, but apprehension, disquiet, and a creeping sense of something irretrievably lost.
Green’s compositions often depicted transitional spaces—thresholds, reflections, shadows. These images suggested that something had just occurred or was about to. It was a way of embodying the liminal state of grief itself—a psychological terrain where the past remains vivid, the present feels blurred, and the future is unknowable. The visual mood was not constructed through overt dramatization but through nuance. A sheet hanging limp on a clothesline felt as if it had been recently abandoned. A fogged mirror suggested not just condensation but emotional opacity. The world he captured appeared drained of color, clarity, and certainty.
Rather than lean into grandiosity, Green cultivated subtle visual disruptions. Imperfections in the film—dust particles, smudges, inconsistent exposure—were retained, giving each photograph a sense of fragility. These imperfections mirrored the fragmented and volatile nature of loss. Far from being technical flaws, they were symbolic ruptures within the frame—echoes of emotional rupture rendered tangible.
This layering of dread into the ordinary transformed his domestic environment into a psychological landscape. Rooms became charged with the remnants of conversation. Objects once functional—like slippers, newspapers, or bedsheets—took on the weight of relics. The entire visual world in Death and Other Belongings became a map of psychic residue, of what grief imprints on the fabric of daily life.
Crafting Memory Through Ambiguity
One of the most striking features of Green’s evolving work is its ability to evoke emotional memory without literal storytelling. Instead of using the camera to document what was directly in front of him, he began to use it as a tool to capture emotional echoes. Each image became a kind of portal—not to facts, but to felt experiences.
This allowed the project to transcend the specificity of personal tragedy and speak to universal emotional truths. Everyone has known absence. Everyone has felt the aftershock of loss. What makes Green’s work so compelling is its refusal to define that loss for you. Instead, it gestures toward what has disappeared and invites you to fill in the rest.
His use of composition, scale, and sequencing became more refined as the project grew. He began to experiment with proximity—zooming in on textures like wrinkled skin or matted hair—not for aesthetic effect, but to represent intimacy and vulnerability. These choices weren’t staged or manipulated; they were rooted in a deep need to externalize internal states.
Green’s avoidance of literal interpretation gave the viewer space to locate their own emotional truths within the work. This is what made Death and Other Belongings resonate so widely. Though born of specific loss, it found a universal pulse. And while the images themselves were often quiet and minimalist, their cumulative impact was profound—drawing the viewer into a slow, immersive meditation on mortality, memory, and the residue left behind by those we love.
In many ways, these turning points—marked by a self-portrait and a funeral image—were not just moments of creative clarity but moments of emotional surrender. Green allowed his grief to become visible without trying to resolve it. He photographed not to move on, but to stay present with his loss, to understand its shape, and to give it a voice without using words.
In doing so, he redefined what a visual narrative could be—not a straight line, but a constellation of feelings, fragments, and shadows that, when viewed together, begin to resemble the shape of remembrance. Through this approach, Green didn’t just capture grief—he made space for it, honored its complexity, and offered others the chance to do the same.
Finding Refuge Through Visual Expression
During the protracted uncertainty of the Covid-19 lockdown, domestic spaces took on unfamiliar dimensions. For Will Green, confined within the quiet walls of his home, the camera became a refuge—a stabilizing force in a world unraveling at the seams. His impulse to document what surrounded him wasn’t rooted in creative ambition but in the need for emotional equilibrium. As reality became increasingly disordered, the repetitive, tactile rituals of shooting and developing film offered a rare sense of order.
In the silence of each day, punctuated only by the monotony of isolation and the weight of loss, photography became more than a habit. It was an anchor, a way of affirming that time was still passing, that reality still had structure—even if fractured. Green’s camera work was not an escape from grief but a way to lean into it, to give form to a feeling that refused to be fully grasped. His surroundings—a cluttered shelf, a window glazed with condensation, a bin smoldering with burnt documents—became stages on which the complexities of mourning unfolded.
While the process began as instinct, it soon became an emotional dialogue between the internal and external. Every frame served as a conduit, transforming inanimate objects into symbols of impermanence, of what had been lost and could never return. These weren’t images taken to preserve memories; they were taken to confront absence.
Symbolism in the Smallest Things
Among the most striking qualities of Green’s visual storytelling is his attentiveness to the mundane. Everyday objects—those often overlooked or dismissed—become vessels of meaning under his gaze. A piece of spoiled fruit doesn’t just signify neglect; it becomes a representation of temporal decay, the organic progression of time untended. A dead wasp, its wings fragile against a smudged window, becomes an emblem of futile struggle.
One of the most emotionally potent images is that of a burnt stack of his parents’ personal documents. Though the paperwork itself was commonplace—bank statements, handwritten notes, outdated chequebooks—its destruction marked a symbolic ritual. It wasn’t just about discarding the past; it was about surrendering to the irreversibility of change. The burning wasn’t cathartic. It was unsettling, a forced relinquishment of the tangible traces of identity and connection.
Such symbolism saturates Green’s work. Objects are never merely objects. They carry psychological residue. The curve of a chair suggests the outline of a body no longer present. A crack in a glass pane evokes rupture. A crumpled dressing gown beside an empty playground slide is a heartbreaking vignette of absence, childhood interrupted, or safety abandoned. These moments become metaphors—unspoken but deeply felt.
In these captured scenes, we are not shown grief; we are invited to inhabit it. Green’s genius lies in his ability to translate emotional density into visual nuance, rendering visible the invisible heaviness of sorrow.
Confronting Loss Without Resolution
Unlike many works that aim to process tragedy through redemption or resolution, Death and Other Belongings refuses closure. It does not attempt to make sense of loss. Instead, it dwells in it, explores it, and lets it linger. There is no moral arc, no tidy endpoint. This deliberate choice adds to the work’s resonance. Grief, after all, does not operate on a clean timeline. It ebbs and flows, interrupts routines, reemerges without warning, and embeds itself into the folds of ordinary life.
Green doesn’t attempt to sanitize this experience. His images are not romantic or heroic; they are honest. The dust that collects on window sills, the gradual softening of objects once handled daily—these are the marks that grief leaves. His work reminds us that loss is not always loud. Often, it’s quiet and cumulative.
The camera becomes an extension of emotional introspection, not a device for artifice. Green resists the temptation to aestheticize suffering. Instead, he trusts the power of suggestion. Viewers are never told what to feel, but the atmosphere he creates—heavy with memory, dense with absence—leaves little room for emotional detachment.
This refusal to resolve is not bleak. On the contrary, it makes the work deeply human. It reflects how grief functions in the real world—not as a clean break, but as a slow reshaping of perception. By remaining with what’s unresolved, Green honors the authenticity of mourning.
Art as Shelter and Testament
As the visual narrative of Death and Other Belongings unfolded, Green’s process gradually revealed itself to be not only reflective but restorative. In the absence of conventional mourning rituals, where funerals were sparse and goodbyes hurried or impossible, his images became ceremonial. Each photo, each moment of attentive looking, was a way of marking significance, of refusing to let go without acknowledgment.
This act of image-making did not bring peace, but it did offer shelter—a psychological sanctuary where grief could be examined and remembered. In an era where loss was often anonymized by numbers and news cycles, Green’s work insisted on specificity. These were his parents. These were their things. This was the room they once lived in. The project became a defiance of erasure.
What sets Green’s visual elegy apart is the way it invites participation. Though steeped in personal loss, the work resonates with anyone who has experienced the quiet devastation of absence. His compositions do not speak in absolutes. They hum with uncertainty, and in that ambiguity lies their power. Viewers bring their own grief, their own memories, and their own ghosts to each image.
In the act of observing, they, too, find a kind of refuge.
Green’s reliance on a simple, analog process—developing film in his bathroom, repurposing domestic spaces into makeshift darkrooms—further reinforces the intimacy of the work. It is crafted with care, not spectacle. Even technical imperfections—grain, streaks, uneven exposures—enhance rather than detract. They serve as reminders that grief, like film, is vulnerable to contamination and time. But it is also enduring.
Death and Other Belongings stands as more than an artistic project. It is a chronicle of survival through observation, a documentation of mourning not through portraiture but through presence. By turning his lens toward the everyday and allowing his grief to take shape in dust, decay, and forgotten corners, Will Green has created a language for the unspeakable.
His images don’t answer questions. They ask them. What remains after loss? What meaning do objects take on when their owners are gone? What happens when a home becomes a shrine?
And perhaps most profoundly: how can we begin to live again when nothing looks the same?
In these unspoken inquiries, Green’s work offers something rare—a space to grieve, to reflect, and to feel without explanation. Through the deeply personal act of visual creation, he has made room for a shared, collective meditation on what it means to endure when everything has changed.
Encoding Loss Through Everyday Objects
Within the quiet intensity of Death and Other Belongings, Will Green’s photographic vision finds its most potent form in the overlooked and the unassuming. Rather than constructing elaborate tableaux or seeking dramatic moments, Green anchors his visual narrative in the profoundly ordinary: a piece of fabric, a used chair, the way light settles on a wall. These objects are not props—they are participants in a quiet conversation about loss, longing, and the fragility of memory.
The recurring presence of domestic details in his work suggests a deep attunement to the echoes of human absence. A crumpled child’s dressing gown beside an abandoned playground slide evokes a moment cut short, a departure mid-motion. Hanging sheets fluttering in the wind might be read as mundane laundry—but under Green’s lens, they begin to resemble burial shrouds, suspended between cleanliness and commemoration. These images resist straightforward interpretation, and that’s their strength. They ask to be felt, not solved.
Green’s attention to discarded or static objects becomes a form of emotional excavation. He documents what remains—not the people themselves, but their traces, their silhouettes left on everyday things. These objects become mnemonic devices, offering viewers pathways into their own memories. Rather than constructing a narrative centered on his personal grief, he creates a visual environment in which grief itself resides—in textures, in shadows, in the residue of the familiar turned unfamiliar.
Emotional Topography of the Domestic
What distinguishes Green’s work is his instinctual ability to imbue common household spaces with emotional tension. His home becomes more than a physical setting; it transforms into a memory palace where each room, surface, and object carries the weight of unspoken stories. The domestic becomes uncanny. Everything is slightly off-center, slightly too quiet, too still. This careful framing allows everyday surroundings to function as metaphors for internal disarray.
An image of burned paper—documents belonging to his deceased parents—doesn’t just signify disposal. It registers the symbolic destruction of a shared past. Chequebooks, letters, forms: they are the artifacts of identity and legacy, and in flames, they evoke both erasure and ritual. Green doesn't simply discard these remnants—he memorializes their absence.
Equally, a mirror reflecting an empty room becomes more than an architectural detail. It symbolizes introspection, void, and the recursive nature of mourning. The viewer is not simply looking into a space but being drawn into a psychological landscape where grief circles back on itself, refracted by memory.
Objects carry latent narratives—narratives made more powerful by their silence. A chair's sag suggests someone has only just stood up, or perhaps never returned. A dusty windowsill becomes a threshold, marking the division between the inside world of grief and the unreachable outside. Through these intimate domestic references, Green paints a portrait not of people, but of their ghostly imprint.
Suggestive Imagery and Interpretive Space
A defining feature of Green’s aesthetic approach is his commitment to visual ambiguity. His compositions often withhold as much as they reveal. There is no forced symbolism, no overt declarations of what the viewer should feel. Instead, the images operate in a suspended state—suggestive, resonant, and open-ended.
This refusal to direct interpretation is where much of the project’s emotional potency lies. Green doesn’t name his grief; he gestures toward it. He doesn’t show tears; he shows the kind of silence that settles in a home once vibrant with life. His restraint opens space for the viewer’s emotional participation. In many ways, the work functions like a poem—rich in subtext, layered in metaphor, and grounded in rhythm and tone more than linear meaning.
A photograph of a dead wasp trapped between glass and curtain might, in another context, feel incidental. In Green’s universe, it reads as a metaphor for entrapment, fragility, and the invisibility of pain. The use of shallow depth and soft focus enhances the spectral quality of his scenes, while the lack of human subjects intensifies the psychological charge. The world he presents is haunted—not in a supernatural sense, but in an emotional one. Everything feels temporarily abandoned, paused, or waiting.
This openness to interpretation invites viewers to locate their own experiences of absence and remembrance within his work. Green’s images become emotional mirrors, capable of reflecting not just his personal loss but the viewer’s as well.
Everyday Artefacts as Memory Catalysts
One of the central ideas woven through Death and Other Belongings is that memory is less about specific events and more about sensory recall—textures, patterns, places, and objects that evoke a past not easily narrated. Green’s choice to focus on these artefacts, rather than faces or events, reflects a deeper understanding of how memory functions. It doesn’t present itself in chronological order; it comes back in waves, often triggered by the smallest stimuli.
These everyday artefacts—linens, broken toys, half-drunk cups of tea—are not just remnants; they are memory activators. They allow a narrative to emerge organically in the viewer’s mind. There is something universal in this: we all remember our loved ones through the physical world they once moved through. The familiar smell of an old scarf, the impression left on a pillow, the chipped edge of a favourite mug—these details often hold more emotional weight than a formal portrait or recorded conversation.
By focusing on these subtle fragments, Green aligns his work with an emotional authenticity that is both rare and relatable. He doesn’t curate his grief; he observes it. The banal becomes sacred. The overlooked becomes the center of focus. His camera doesn’t search for grandeur—it lingers, it notices, it honors.
And in doing so, Death and Other Belongings becomes not just a personal elegy but a universal map for navigating loss. Green’s approach reminds us that grief is not always loud or dramatic. Sometimes, it is quiet. Sometimes, it speaks through things.
It is in this quietude that the work achieves its most profound impact. It doesn’t provide answers. It doesn’t promise peace. But it offers something else—an invitation to witness, to remember, and to feel. Through a language built not on narrative but on resonance, Green has created a testament to the enduring power of objects to carry emotion, to bear memory, and to speak for the silences we cannot.
Visual Proximity as Emotional Compass
A notable feature of Green’s work is the dominance of close-up compositions. While this may appear stylistic, it reflects something much deeper. At a subconscious level, the artist’s focus on tight, confined frames mirrors the psychological and physical constraints he was living under. The world, once expansive, had shrunk to fragments and interiors.
Even when working abroad on other long-term projects, Green finds himself gravitating back to this intimate visual language. He often attempts to widen his frame, only to discover that his instinct pulls him toward the granular. In doing so, he captures the emotional nuances of his subjects—those moments just before or after something important has happened.
This aesthetic choice aligns with how grief operates: it doesn’t announce itself with fanfare. It arrives in small moments, quiet disruptions, the things left unsaid. Green’s use of proximity invites us to experience these micro-tragedies up close.
From Commissioned Work to Unfiltered Emotion
Before embarking on this personal journey, Green’s career was rooted in commercial practice. That discipline taught him technical precision, but emotional expression was not its focus. In turning to personal narrative, Green had to shed familiar constraints and learn how to communicate without commercial polish.
What emerged was a voice unafraid of ambiguity, guided more by intuition than clarity. The transition required trust—trust in the image, in emotion, and in imperfection. Influenced by visual movements that embrace rawness and mood, such as Japanese photography post-WWII, Green began forming a style grounded in subjective experience.
This departure from commercial formality not only transformed his approach but redefined his relationship with creative work. It became not a task but a compulsion—an outlet for truth, no matter how fragmented.
Resourcefulness in Adversity: Creating with Constraints
The production of Death and Other Belongings was marked by practical limitations. Lacking a professional darkroom, Green developed most of his film in his own home—using a bathroom and a cramped understairs cupboard rigged with blackout cloths.
Technical challenges such as dust, water streaks, and uneven development became inevitable. Yet these imperfections became part of the work’s aesthetic DNA. The visual grit added to its raw honesty, reflecting a life that had unraveled and was being stitched back together piece by imperfect piece.
Only a few images were professionally scanned and retouched for the final book, and even then, the process was slow and painstaking. But that painstaking effort mirrors the emotional labor behind every frame.
Juxtaposing the Private and the Global
Although deeply personal, Death and Other Belongings refuses to exist in isolation. A key element of the book is its inclusion of a transcript from the first global ProMed alert—an email sent in December 2019 that quietly signaled the onset of a world-changing event.
This document, with its clinical tone and ominous implications, acts as a counterpoint to the emotional intensity of Green’s images. It situates his personal experience within the broader pandemic context, linking the solitary with the collective. The collision of a mundane domestic unraveling and a vast global tragedy imbues the project with layered resonance.
The pairing of visuals with sparse but pointed text lends the book a haunting rhythm. One passage, recounting Green’s final visit to his parents’ care home, stands out for its raw vulnerability. It becomes a form of written reconciliation—a means of saying what images alone cannot.
Creative Integrity in the Face of Loss
For those considering a similar path—using creativity to process trauma—Green’s advice is grounded in authenticity. Work from your own truth, he says, and let the process unfold organically. Do not be distracted by external expectations or market trends. What connects most deeply is what is most honest.
He also speaks to the necessity of patience. Some stories take years to form. His own journey with Death and Other Belongings stretched across multiple years, evolving in both intention and execution. There was no plan for a book at the start—only the impulse to survive through creation.
Ultimately, the power of Green’s work lies in its openness. It does not attempt to resolve grief, only to sit with it, examine it, and acknowledge its presence.
Final Reflections:
Death and Other Belongings is more than a collection of images—it is a visual elegy for a world irrevocably changed. Through Will Green’s deeply personal yet hauntingly universal lens, we are invited into a space where grief is not sanitized or resolved, but allowed to breathe, shift, and unfold. In a time when the pandemic left so many people grieving in silence, his work offers a resonant form of connection—one that doesn’t rely on shared words but shared emotions.
What makes Green’s work profoundly moving is its refusal to simplify or explain. Grief, after all, is not linear. It loops back on itself, resurfaces when least expected, and embeds itself in the quietest corners of our lives. Green doesn’t shy away from this discomfort. Instead, he captures its quiet imprint—on objects, on shadows, on the mundane details we often overlook. His photographs hold space for the invisible weight of loss and show how absence can be just as tangible as presence.
The book also speaks to a broader truth about artistic expression in times of crisis: when the world breaks down, art becomes both a refuge and a response. Green’s process—improvised darkrooms, imperfect negatives, and the instinctive act of shooting what surrounded him—reflects how creativity often emerges under constraint. There’s a raw honesty in the way his work embraces imperfection, reminding us that healing isn’t about resolution but recognition.
By juxtaposing intensely private experiences with the cold language of a global health alert, Green underscores a tension that defined the early pandemic: the enormity of global tragedy compressed into the confines of our homes. His work gently bridges that distance, reminding us that behind every statistic was a life, a family, a story.
In the end, Death and Other Belongings isn’t just a document of loss—it’s a testament to resilience, to the quiet endurance of memory, and to the power of small moments to carry profound emotional weight. Through the fragments Green has shared, we’re reminded that even in the face of silence and absence, stories still find a way to be told.
