The Travellers

An exhibition of thirty postmortem portraits by photographer Elizabeth Heyert. Shot in a Harlem funeral parlor, Heyert’s nearly life-size color photographs evolved from her fascination with the practice of some members of the Harlem community, people with traditional ties to their church and to their Southern roots, of elaborately dressing corpses for burial. No matter the circumstances of their life, or death, the departed are, in one undertaker’s words, “going to the party”—jubilantly dressed in satin dresses, white suits, tuxedos, and magnificent hats, for their journey to paradise.

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