To Survive Death

Ballard’s book borrows its title from the 1962 foundational work on the topic by academic Robert C.W. Ettinger. In purely speculative theory, once declared legally dead, cellular death can be halted by extremely low temperatures and someone can be thawed and revived with their personality and memories intact at a later date. “If civilization endures,” writes Ettinger, “medical science should eventually be able to repair almost any damage to the human body, including freezing damage and senile debility or other causes of death.” To this extent, cryonicists have designed a system to give the greatest chance to future regeneration, including processes to ensure that dead bodies are preserved as quickly as possible. One photo in Ballard’s book, for example, shows a repurposed epilepsy monitor, which is normally used to alert caregivers of seizures during sleep. This monitor, however, has been engineered to call a nearby cryonics facility in case the individual succumbs to a more final form of slumber.

Ballard’s photographs preserve an eerie reminder of the very real desire to see our ultimate inevitability as a design flaw in the human machine. Or to survive death. Today, the burgeoning anti-aging industry hawks techniques such infrared saunas and oxygen therapy as ways to extend lifespan, and research is underway into using gene editing tools to delay or reverse our decline. What was once limited to a fringe population has entered mainstream tech culture through TikToks and Netflix documentaries, with the ultra-wealthy spearheading research into blood transfusions, nanomedicine, and DNA repair, technologies that cryonicists believe could help to revive their preserved bodies. 

For many of us, the idea of freezing one’s body, or even only your head, is just another weird white guy pipe dream. (Cut to cartoon Richard Nixon’s cranium perched on a giant robot torso in Futurama). It is one of those ways of thinking that is infinitely attractive to some and completely undesirable quackery to others. Though perhaps what is most troubling for cryonic nay-sayers is the fact that converts are often highly intelligent. Ettinger himself was a lifelong university physics professor, and the majority of adherents have advanced degrees in science and engineering. "I am convinced that man will remake himself [genetically],” Nobel Prize winner Hermann J. Muller says in Ettinger’s book. “We may attain to modes of thought and living that today would seem inconceivably god-like.” One could argue, however, that the scientific positivist bent is already a precondition for fantasies of techno-utopist kind.

Ballard’s photos function as a detached documentation of the phenomenon, their style suspended between medical narrative and artistic study. “Keeping an artistic distance was always extremely important for me in this project,” he tells me. He did, however, often feel drafted as the cryonics movement’s unofficial photographer – and had to deftly balance between observer and insider. “The running joke,” he recalls, “was that I’d have to be preserved myself to finish the project, so I could take the final portraits when they all wake up.”

Ballard says that from a purely technical point of view, Ettinger’s famous quote that “the freezer is more attractive than the grave” does hold true. His guarded ambiguity about the feasibility of cryonics shows through in the way he chooses his words during our conversation. Rather than say someone has passed away, Ballard carefully notes she has “completed her first life cycle” and is now cryonically preserved. The wording makes my ears prick up. Has he, too, signed up for an afterlife on ice? 

The short answer, he tells me, is no – but nearly so. A wealthy cryonicist once offered to sponsor his cryopreservation, but Ballard turned him down. Listening to his story, I sense he wanted to finish the book first, then weigh the possibility of signing up for immortality later. Considering a cryonics contract carries a hefty price tag, his hesitation suggests a deep fidelity to his process – he wouldn’t let the prospect of a paid trip to personal resurrection influence the objectivity of his lens.  

Now a father of two young children, Ballard is no longer as personally interested in life extension as he was before. His prospect of immortality is embodied in his children, in the knowledge he passes onto them and in their ability to carry on his memory in infinite ways. “Many people sign up in their twenties, a time in one’s life when this idea seems to be the most attractive. But when they have children, the allure drops off,” he says. “While I don’t have the statistics,” he continues, “it’s clear from the conferences I’ve attended that the vast majority of adherents are older, single men without children.”  

We wonder together: Are they betting on being able to do things differently next time? Is cryonics, for some, a promise of a second chance to live life on one’s own terms, having sacrificed too much to the gods of conformity and work the first time around? What pushes someone to bet hundreds of thousands for a slim chance of a second life cycle?

Every photograph in his book could be expanded into a novella: the shed of an undocumented Norwegian national in Nederland, Colorado, that contains a frozen grandpa whose legend has spurred the town’s yearly Frozen Dead Guy Days festival; a portrait of the cleaning lady of 10 Downing Street sitting on her bed at home,  dreaming of future regeneration technology to turn her aging, overworked body into a pop music starlet; an MIT graduate rocket scientist tinkering with a projectile in his garage, with 1960s space-age aspirations of a second life cycle; a box of photos from an aging jazz drummer who moved all of his belongings in an old van to finish his first life close to a cryonics facility – every one of them drawn to the prospect of their own immortality. “There is a whole spectrum of personalities that I met during these ten years,” says Ballard. And his juxtaposition of portraits and objects leaves enough space for interpretation while telling a fascinating, incomplete story. Ballard’s detached, objective lens captures the bare vulnerability of the desire to live forever, leaving even the most cryonically skeptical among us ponder its premises with a new perspective. His photographs capture human engineering at the intersection of design, bricolage, and existential dread. Death becomes a tinkering space, the body an intimate interface where the  machina humana can be repaired as it fails; a continual switching out of replaceable parts in an ongoing battle against decay. Someday, future earthlings might shake their heads at our antique attempts at cryopreservation, or applaud our ingenuity with the tools we had at hand. Ballard’s images urge the viewer to connect to their own sense of mortal dread, and ask the final question: is it possible, or even desirable, to survive “time’s relentless melt”?

Michael David Mitchell, Disegno #39 Spring 2025