Photography, Birth, and Death-Morgan Kirol

I find it so interesting our class’s reaction to post-mortem photography. I am not sure if it is because of our generational views or lack of experience with death and the physicality of it that we are frightened and disgusted with the idea of photographing the dead. I found it so interesting that Wells addresses that the idea of death has become an increasingly private realm in this modern era. The societal view of photography has shifted more towards a tendency “to accept photographs as reflections of the real as well as to contemporary attitudes towards death”(Wells 201). It is odd to think that photographing the dead was common and the corpses of loved ones were displayed in homes. I also found it very interesting that this practice is still done today but it is seen as shameful and highly private. With the birth of photography, came this inherent need to photograph and portrait our loved ones who had passed away. This was often because this was the only time that they would be photographed as the technology was not nearly as popular as it is now. In modern times, photography is almost fetishized. This obsession with picturing reality over and over at a thousand different filters and angles seems sinful when you think of hearbroken mothers and fathers photographing the lifeless bodies of their toddlers in their best white funeral wear. Their eyes are peacefully shut and they look as though they are lost in a misty dream. As Wells discussed, when the reality TV show America’s Next Top Model attempted to photograph perspective models as corpses in a crime scene, this was seen as ‘extreme, misogynistic objectification’ (Wells 202). Why is this? Why now, is the idea of mimicking a corpse a form of objectification? I feel as though as society exploits more and more of the world around us, society has become even more sensitive to the harshness of reality. Death is a form of “body in transition”(Wells 203). It is just another part of the cycle of life but the idea of picturing it, revealing its “reality” is now seen as obscene, shameful. Society is hypocritical in this sense. We exploit everything but our inevitable end.