In 1962, Robert Ettinger’s book The Prospect of Immortality introduced the public to cryonics—the practice of freezing a body after death in the belief that future science might restore it to life. Murray Ballard’s photobook of the same name, published by GOST Books in 2016, takes Ettinger’s proposition as its starting point and examines the movement it set in motion. The title is shared deliberately: the book does not illustrate the original text so much as revisit its promise through the people who have organised their lives, and their deaths, around it.
Ballard’s investigation unfolded over nine years, a duration that shapes the work’s character. Rather than a survey of equipment or a tour of facilities, the sequence attends to a small, international community of adherents—patients, advocates, technicians and families—and to the procedures, waiting rooms and storage arrangements that sustain their convictions. The result is patient and observational, closer to social portraiture than to scientific reportage. The hardback clothbound volume, 185 pages, gives the images room to accumulate.
Published more than half a century after Ettinger’s book, the project belongs to a lineage of photographic work that tests how belief and technology meet in ordinary settings. The subject is extreme, but the photographs resist spectacle; their interest lies in the everyday administration of an extraordinary idea. For collectors drawn to long-form documentary practice and to photography that treats speculative science as a matter of human commitment, this is a considered example—one whose value rests on its sustained attention rather than on novelty or rarity.
