Photography, Birth and Death.

"To take a photograph is to participate in another person's (or thing's) mortality..." Up until I read this article I had never really thought of photography that way, although now I do. I don't take a lot of portraits of other people so I never had to think about how I am capturing someone's mortality and essentially making their likeness immortal through a negative, or an image file. But there were so many times I've looked at old photographs and thought about how every single person in the picture was dead, regardless of what they were doing in the picture. It's strange to see a moment captured of someone who is no longer alive, so I think when we see photographs of people who are dead it doesn't make sense to us. Photography has been given to us as a medium to capture moments of us at our liveliest; birthday parties, celebrations, etc. It captures of essence of our lives in the photo and a photo of a dead corpse cannot do that because there technically is no life to be seen in the photo. Pictures of corpses truly are "the living image of a dead thing." Not only is it seen taboo in our society to photograph the dead (it's seen as disrespectful to the dead), I don't really think many people see a reason for it now that we get to have so many pictures of our loved ones when are alive. Since photography has become accessible to virtually everyone it is not necessary to wait until someone has passed to be able to take a picture of them like so many had to when photography was still an expensive and exclusive medium.