A personal necessity to occupy herself with death, caused Bastienne Schmidt (1961) to make a series of photographs concerned with the ways in which man deals with the end of life in different parts of the world. She discovered that inhabitants of South-American countries occupy themselves with this much more than Europeans. In our culture death is something we would prefer to ignore, pretending it did not exist. However, in Latin-American countries it is normal that people live with death, Vivir la Muerte-. Schmidt took photographs of different rituals surrounding death, more open and more emotional compared to the European mourning process. Latin-American rituals give the mourner a place within the mourning process and therefore integrate death in life. To Schmidt The Garden of Eden is not paradise on earth, but rather "an openness in the totality of life; all its pleasures and sadness."