Abstract
This chapter blurs the distinction between analog and digital and between visual, aural/verbal stories and imagination. Exploring the connection between images (mainly photographs) and death, it follows the intimate journey of the author accompanying his father’s death. Exploring the historical nexus between photography and death, the chapter starts by suggesting that photographs of dead people are active ways for incorporating the dead into the lives of the living. Looking at photographs taken by the author in the aftermath of his father’s death, it then reflects on the act of making photographs as a way for opening up time and acknowledging the present. Addressing the capacity of words to evoke images (ekphrasis), it suggests that images are a tactile, mimetic activity capable of bridging the gap between life and death.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
On one occasion, having run out of paper on my notepad while waiting for the doctors to complete their visits, I started writing on my own arm. Notes written in different colors looked like an old, badly executed tattoo. I took a number of pictures of those texts and incorporated them into my phone archive. And I also brought some of them back into a new notepad at a later stage.
- 3.
http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/when-john-berger-looked-at-death. Benjamin (1999) said that a human being’s real life “first assumes transmissible form at the moment of his death” (p. 93).
- 4.
For the reasons discussed in the text, I rather use this term than more conventional ones, such as shooting and capturing.
- 5.
Such situation is, for instance, very different in India, where images of people dying in public places are often displayed in the media.
- 6.
My analysis is of course based on the situated context of my family and its history. I claim, however, that the same kind of exercise of exploration of the meaning of photographs could be addressed in a variety of different contexts.
- 7.
“Tilet” is a word in the Piemontese dialect identifying this particular form of necrological obituary announcement.
- 8.
This realization—that is, that vision functions on the basis of light entering the eye and not the other way around (as the Greeks and Romans believed)—is what led Al Hazen to design the first camera obscura.
- 9.
I refer here to the Italian translation of the text published in 1977 with the title Le Porte Regali.
- 10.
As a reference, see also Stoller’s (1984) beautiful reflections on this text.
- 11.
In this critique, Latour refers to Cartesianism as the central pillar of modernism. According to him, Western societies have never been truly convinced and clear about the distinctions between nature and culture, body and soul, as it is often argued.
- 12.
Pinney makes this point regarding the photographs of Harriet and Robert Tytler of critical events in India during the time of the Raj (see also Chaudhary 2012).
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Favero, P.S.H. (2018). Images of Living and Dying. In: The Present Image. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69499-3_5
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