Timothy Hursley’s Funeral Homes of the American South is a stark exploration of decay and mortality, using abandoned funeral homes to evoke themes of isolation, loss, and the uncanny.
Through his haunting compositions, Hursley captures the overlooked and often abandoned funeral homes of the rural South, transforming these spaces into symbols of isolation and mortality. His images are stripped of human presence, yet they resonate with absence—suggesting lives once lived, communities in decline, and the quiet persistence of memory. The resulting body of work is both documentary and poetic, offering a view of the South not through its traditions or landscapes, but through its empty thresholds, where life has already passed through.
Among the most evocative pieces is Train Ride (2012), a photograph depicting two bare coffins positioned on either side of a child’s toy train track. The setting—a dim, wood-paneled room with drawn blinds—feels stifling, as though the entire space were itself a coffin. The train track, encircling the space, becomes an unsettling metaphor for life’s inescapable trajectory toward death. There is something absurd yet deeply poignant in this juxtaposition of play and finality, of movement and stasis. Hursley’s ability to extract existential weight from such mundane details elevates his work beyond mere documentation, into something psychological, even surreal.
Hursley, best known for his architectural photography, takes a deeply personal approach in this series, moving beyond formalism to something more elegiac. His fascination with forgotten spaces was first sparked in Little Rock, Arkansas, when he came across two abandoned hearses—an encounter that set him on a years-long journey to document funeral homes, their interiors, and the surrounding landscapes. In doing so, he constructs a photographic language of impermanence, one that acknowledges both the inevitability of loss and the strange beauty found in its wake.
