Transitions:
A Photographic Exploration on Death & Dying
By Simon Campbell
Seed-funded by the Health, Care and Wellbeing Research and Innovation Group (USW), Transitions explores the role of visual art in how we speak and come to understand death and dying. I have known Simon Campbell for nearly a decade, and our shared starting point for this commission was the belief that end-of-life photography can reshape how we perceive death and dying, revealing the beauty, vulnerability, and humanity present in moments of profound transition. While end-of-life photography often turns toward the rawness of grief, the bonds of family, and the rituals of remembrance, this commission takes a different path. Here, the Welsh landscape and all it holds are the site of inquiry, inspiration and interpretation. As the work unfolded, themes of transition, transformation, and transcendence emerged as central to Simon’s response. Commissioned in March 2024 and completed in January 2026, the project was initially envisioned as a four- to six-month undertaking. Instead, it evolved into a meditative journey, allowing Simon to immerse himself in the subject and draw on decades of land, sky, rock, and seascape photography. He admits that his exploration into this theme is part photography, part reflection, and part spiritual exploration – something that is far from finished.
You can download the report here:
Photographer's Note
For me, there is no death, only transformation. This commission led me on a visual meditation on the eternal cycle, drawing on the natural world to explore death and dying as a graceful shift, a release of the physical, and a return to source – that space of renewal and transformation. Ice, water, dying leaves, seeds, as well as shadow, light, and the ethereal have all been sources of inspiration and wonder. What has emerged is a series of images that can be taken as stepping stones, offering ways to explore the beauty of change in, by, and through death, and on notions of transformation, release and renewal; with loss framed as life in motion.
What follows is an exploration of these images. Each is accompanied by a caption that whispers the photographer’s focus and gentle provocation. The invitation is to sit with the image and the capture, to allow them to meet you where you are, and perhaps to find within them new ways of approaching your own understandings of death and dying.
Be sure to double click on the image.
About the 2024/5 Commissions
Delve into a series of commissioned podcasts that were produced from a small grant provided by the Health, Care and Wellbeing Research and Innovation Group, University of South Wales. This engagement and outreach work allows for gentle conversations that offer insight into end-of-life matters from varying perspectives. This is not research, for sure. Instead, this is the embryonic matter in which meaningful and dialogical engagement is rooted and, from much of subsequent collaborative research, begins to find root. As commissions, this is not at all my work. I am grateful to the artist who explored this area for the first time, and to the three women - all of whom are part of the end-of-life eco-system - who accepted their commission and have worked to pull together their series and allowed me to showcase it here.
Transitions: A Photographic Study on Death and Dying. By Simon Campbell
Passing Perspective Podcast Series. By Donna Phillips-Sibanda
Whisperings - a podcast series with death doulas. By Jane Delredge
Holding space for Black women and their end-of-life work podcast series. By Debi XXX