Death and Photography
One cannot think about photography without thinking about death. Two fundamental texts that contend with the implications of this linkage are Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucinda and Susan Sontag’s On Photography. According to Sontag, “All photographs are memento mori.” She continues, “To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.” Barthes describes the photograph as a form of flat death. Producing a photograph is like participating in a micro-version of death. The photograph says of its subject, “this will be and has been,” and “he is dead and is going to die.” We see the dead through photographs, inventing new forms of history. Therefore, Barthes claims that as opposed to relying on monuments to make death immortal, the advent of photography replaces this role. Similarly, Sontag writes in a separate essay that precedes On Photography, “Photography also converts the whole world into a cemetery. Photographers, connoisseurs of beauty, are also — wittingly or unwittingly — the recording angels of death.” If the photograph is the new monument, and the act of making the photograph makes the world a cemetery,
what does it mean to document burial spaces?
I am essentially photographing nothing, making more death out of what was already dead.
One cannot think about photography without thinking about death. Two fundamental texts that contend with the implications of this linkage are Roland Barthes’ Camera Lucinda and Susan Sontag’s On Photography. According to Sontag, “All photographs are memento mori.” She continues, “To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability. Precisely by slicing out this moment and freezing it, all photographs testify to time’s relentless melt.” Barthes describes the photograph as a form of flat death. Producing a photograph is like participating in a micro-version of death. The photograph says of its subject, “this will be and has been,” and “he is dead and is going to die.” We see the dead through photographs, inventing new forms of history. Therefore, Barthes claims that as opposed to relying on monuments to make death immortal, the advent of photography replaces this role. Similarly, Sontag writes in a separate essay that precedes On Photography, “Photography also converts the whole world into a cemetery. Photographers, connoisseurs of beauty, are also — wittingly or unwittingly — the recording angels of death.” If the photograph is the new monument, and the act of making the photograph makes the world a cemetery,
what does it mean to document burial spaces?
I am essentially photographing nothing, making more death out of what was already dead.
Blankness.
What is written on a gravestone has very little to do with what the buried person was like when they were living. There is such little information for me to uncover, besides the dates of their life, their possible gender, and their familial position as a spouse, sibling, or child. Photographs can be absent from this context as well.
What is written on a gravestone has very little to do with what the buried person was like when they were living. There is such little information for me to uncover, besides the dates of their life, their possible gender, and their familial position as a spouse, sibling, or child. Photographs can be absent from this context as well.
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. United Kingdom: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1982.
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. United Kingdom: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.
Hujar, Peter, and Susan Sontag. Portraits in Life and Death. New York: Da Capo Press, 1976.
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. United Kingdom: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.
Hujar, Peter, and Susan Sontag. Portraits in Life and Death. New York: Da Capo Press, 1976.