Vienna: The first and last breath - Austria 2006

Gilbertson received a grant in 2006 from the Creative research facility, Fabrica. He spent much of that year in Vienna, Austria photographing the formal and informal rituals surrounding death and birth. The photographs were exhibited at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2006, and at the Künstler Haus in Vienna in 2008.

The undertakers of Vienna told jokes all day when I drove around with them. Jokes of death, of life and of their work. The only time they became serious was when they handled the dead and when they spoke of birth.