When a fledgling husband’s beloved bride died in a horrific accident just a couple of weeks after their wedding day, he was understandably more than a little distressed. Mangled by a combine harvester when she strayed too far from a summertime picnic, the poor man could barely recognise the body of his dear deceased.
She was young and pretty and truly they were in love, and now he couldn’t even organise an open casket for her funeral, so horribly had she been disfigured. But in his extreme agitation the man turned to the professionals, only not of the funeral parlour, but of Adobe Photoshop.
And now in a series of photo edits which have been collectively described as a ‘miracle’, the grieving husband has been given more than a glimpse of a pristine wife in an open grave. The genius graphic designers from a firm somewhere in Aberdeen – more shamans than Scots – have somehow conjured a full resuscitation, showing the woman in all her vestal glory, airbrushed clean of blood and gore.
Let’s take a look at the pleasant sequence the editing experts put together to cheer the crestfallen groom.
A typical burial ground. Nothing much appears to be happening, but even over the medium of the computer screen, this is a palpably disquieting still.
Now a faint stirring, a barely discernible rustling of leaves. And the deceased bride’s head, translucent but unmistakable, pops up from the earthy hollow.
Is she levitating or moved by some invisible pulley or lever, as she makes her way out of the soil and dirt?
Then she lingers on the threshold, poised deftly between the worlds of the living and the dead.
As she grows more vital, as the Photoshop marvels push the opacity up, she drifts seamlessly towards her lifelong lover.
And with a horizontal flip, with a playful toss of the head, she gives her husband a look which says come hither to me.
‘Memories fade’, said the husband, holding the gathered photo edits in one hand. Yet as his tear-soaked fingers gripped tightly the printed papers, he added ‘but these photographs which crudely imagine her impossible resurrection will forever live on’.
