Photography, Birth and Death

Photographing the dead, as we have talked about in class, was known to be a very private and personal act done by families. Today, we would find it very disturbing and eerie to take a picture of a dead body of a loved one. However during the Victorian era, life was not as long as it is now, in fact nobody lived to be 90 or 100 like most to today. One quote that Wells mentions is by Roland Barthes who says "that the corpse is alive, as corpse: it is the living image of a dead thing" I thought this was an interesting perspective to the dead body in terms of photographing, or freezing it, in a moment in time. We have learned that photography is evidence of something that once was. In History of Photography 1, Micheal Ortwitz stressed the idea that when you take a picture of simply a mug on a table, that mug was really there in real time, making it a moment in history. Similar to how a body was once there and in that exact moment, dead or alive, it reiterates the idea of a moment frozen in time. In a sense, this is how the corpse becomes alive again. Again, we don't find this too appealing because taking pictures of dead bodies is something that only forensic and criminal investigators do to solve crimes. This is mainly because photography has given us the ability to capture our loved ones over and over again while they are living, and we want to remember them as they were, not as a dead corpse laying in casket.