what remains. Robert Shults’s The Washing Away of Wrongs. Decomposition.

– photo Robert Shults, from the series The Washing Away of Wrongs

Allison Meier: “clothing and personal items from suspected migrants found on the US-Mexico border”

(at Hyperallergic)

– photo Robert Shults, from the series The Washing Away of Wrongs

Allison Meier: “with flowers from a nearby tree fallen across a donor’s body”

(at Hyperallergic)

Photographer Robert Shults shot the series The Washing Away of Wrongs at the 26-acre Forensic Anthropology Centre of Texas State University, the world’s largest outdoor facility for the study of human decomposition through donated cadavers.

Robert Shults: …”a process virtually teeming with life as new microbiomes rise and fall during decomposition. There is an astounding range of plants and animals that depend on the donors’ bodies as a critical part of their own life cycle. As such, when I visit the facility, I don’t really feel the presence of death hanging over the ranch. Rather I get the most palpable sense I’ve felt anywhere of how an individual contributes to the lineage of natural history.” (from here)

The whole series is available here.