Photography and the Taboo of Death by CM Brosteanu

Artists’ interest in mortality can be seen in work from Hans Holbein’s 16th-century The Ambassadors, in which a skewed skull comments on the vanity of the sitters, to Damien Hirst’s recent diamond encrusted skull.
In ‘Self Portrait as a Drowned Man’, Hippolyte Bayard for instance theatrically staged his own death as early as 1840. Bayard’s fascination with his own death reflects a fetishist attitude towards death photographers have explored ever since.
Today death has become a forbidden subject. As the common practice of post-mortem photography in North America and Western Europe has largely ceased, the portrayal of such images has become increasing seen as vulgar. But is the contemporary photography of the dead forensic record, sensationalism or art?

From the beginning of photography’s history, photographers have depicted death and 19th century daguerreotypes show dead infants fully clothed and posed. These photographs served less as a reminder of mortality than as a keepsake to remember the deceased.
Death is not viewed as a taboo but rather as something that is almost a celebration of life. The subject is usually depicted so as to seem in a deep sleep, or else arranged to appear more lifelike. (Fig.1)
Photographs of dead relatives were openly displayed in the home and were sent to friends and relatives unable to attend funeral services. Victorian era childhood mortality rates were extremely high, and a post-mortem photograph might have been the only image of the child the family ever had. (Williams, 1995)

The practice peaked in popularity around the end of the 19th century and died out as “snapshot” photography became more commonplace, although a few examples of formal memorial portraits were still being produced well into the 20th century.

Today advances in health care have extended life expectancy and the movement of death, from home to the hospital, means that it is rare to experience caring for the dying. The preparation and disposal of deceased is performed by professionals. As a result the ability to discuss openly the nature of death has been lost. (Hobson, 1995)
As living people we have a certain privacy. Death obviates this as the dead body becomes a public object. We are fascinated by what is hidden and what we may perceive as taboo. The photographs of death challenge the idea of looking and the notion of photography itself given its reality. None of the contemporary artists give comfort but all have engaged with fears and vulnerabilities.
The audience remains in a state of confusion about the ethical issues which surround the image of death and the act of looking is questioned.
We look so we can learn and by elucidation death is no longer a mystery but simply a fact. (Williams, 1995)
When played out by actors in film and television drama and documentary death becomes unreal and somehow acceptable. Photographs of private death, of the deceased domestic body have come to be seen by many as macabre and disturbing.
The body wears out, it breaks down or is destroyed. Unable to serve a useful function, it is buried or burned.

Andres Serrano is an American photographer and artist who has become notorious through his photos of corpses and his use of faeces and bodily fluids in his work. He has shot a vast array of subject matter including portraits of Klansmen, morgue photos, and pictures of burn victims.
In the early 1990s Serrano undertook a three month project in a morgue, where he photographed 95 percent of the bodies passing through during that time.
Despite the shocking subject of these photographs his picturing has a certain elegance. The images are spectacular and literal. Such photographic portraits show it is possible to portray the bodies of the dead without necessarily enacting representational violence, without subjecting the dead to alterity or to isolation.
The face of the corpse is entirely hidden in Rat Poison Suicide protecting the subject identity. (Fig.2) With her arms raised stiffly and both hands clenched in fists, the body’s position is emphasized by the dramatic lighting from a hidden source behind the head. The hands, rising up like rat claws, present a view of the body that enacts a grotesque form of mimesis to reflect the substance that killed her.

Because one is not provided information about the personal, psychological, or economic chain of events that led to this death, Rat Poison Suicide remains as distanced from the concrete reality of the subject’s former life as it is remote from the viewer. (Fitzpatrick, 2008)
When the photograph was exhibited in New York as a public installation, he got an audience who was exposed to the work either they wanted or not. The reactions vary from “I don’t find it offensive, I find it sad” to “I don’t like to get up in the morning to see that. We have enough problems, we don’t need more”.
“That’s what artists do, they point to things in society that we don’t always want to look at” Serrano explains.
Despite the fact that few of the deaths in The Morgue are attributed to physical illness, a view of these corpses as inherently pathological is strong, due to the various forms of linked “depravity” that enshroud them, especially suicide and violent crime. The morgue context puts all the corpses under suspicion. “In the morgue, very few people died of peaceful death” (Serrano, 1998)
The impact of Serrano’s work on the western cultural imagination has been significant. The Morgue confirms our worst fears, that we live in a society which perceive to be irreparably damaged and diseased.

Krass Clement Kay Christensen is a Danish photographer who has specialized in documentary work. Krass documented his mother hospitalisation and eventual death. He photographed his mother’s naked helplessness, her sagging, sutured corpse and burning remains. (Fig.3) The work is deeply shocking. Both photographer and subject know what the conclusion will be, a harrowing and inevitable death.

Most of us would rather not think about death, but the likelihood is that we will suffer bereavement at some time in our lives. Sitting at the death bed of a parent is as much one of life’s defining experiences as the birth of a child, but one which, not surprisingly, is much less communicated.
We see in his work the loneliness of institutionalisation, the post-mortem, the laying out by undertakers. The story explicitly charts her passage from hospital bed to crematorium, with remarkable courage and honesty. (Hobson, 1995)

Roland Barthes famously wrote in his book Camera Lucida: “Death is the Eidos of Photography”. As Barthes exhaustively argues in his book, the desire to photograph is inextricably linked to the desire of capturing subjects that the photograph will outlive. In Barthes’ case, it’s a photograph of his late mother which prompts his nostalgia through the photographic image. (Barthes, 1982)

In England, Sue Fox has taken some 1,500 photographs of dead bodies she has met in a Manchester morgue but hardly anyone has seen them. She did a couple of exhibitions, left a comments book and got loads of abuse. The reaction on her work was almost violent with comments from audience like “your life must be very scary”, “you’re sick” and “you’ve got problems, you must come to the Lord.” (Treneman, 1998)
Her photographs are like snapshots, almost casual and full of curiosity. Working on this project, Fox had little interest in the medical understanding of the aspects of death but her focus was on the ideas of people’s failure to understand it.
She finds people unfamiliar with death these days, they don’t think of death at all. As a culture we feel as we want to live forever, trying to do things health wise and have implants done, almost extending life. (Fox, 1998)
Her work has almost an educational purpose, it is intended to wake people up so they can enjoy the time left and accept that death is common. The images are saying we should look at the facts – the nature reflecting the death of the body. The attitude towards death is reverent. Within the mass of documentation which she has produced are more abstractive views of the body (Fig.4)
Western culture doesn’t allow us to look at death the way we used to. We find it morbid because it reflects our own mortality.

When considering the photography of death, the depiction of the dead stranger, while acceptable in the news is contentious in art.
While it is obvious that the dead are lacking the agency necessary to claim and assert an identity from their perspective, the various ways in which certain identities are imposed upon them are worthy of consideration. When considered in terms of the dead, the forcible process of subjectivity is put into relief.
The dead can neither self-represent nor experience the recognition of living others who see them, name them, or create images of them. Because the dead have no recourse to agency, they can neither recognize that the subjective process is occurring, nor can they attempt to qualify or counter its effects by asserting identities from their own points of view. (Fitzpatrick, 2008)

From Bayard’s staged death, to Victorian era post-mortem photography, Serrano’s photography represents the fascination with death, the macabre, the morbid. The main difference between Victorian era post-mortem photography and more recent examples of this type of photography can be found in the way these images are consumed. In the Victorian era the post-mortem photograph was usually a unique object commissioned for purely personal consumption. Contemporary art photographers or photojournalists on the other hand depend on the photograph entering a cycle of consumption.
In addition to that, Victorian era post-mortem photography aspired to depict the subject as still alive. The photograph was seen as the medium which would momentarily enliven the deceased subject. More recent examples of post-mortem photography are far less ambiguous in its depiction of death.
As soon as the image enters a highly complex image economy via the mass media, contemporary post-mortem photography becomes the antidote to Victorian era photographs of the dead. Rather than depicting subjects that look alive, the dead are represented precisely as such.

Clearly, modern viewers see images of death in a different light, as documents that provide information rather than venerable monuments to the dead. Displaying such images has become increasing seen as vulgar. Forty years ago all serious photographers agreed Walker Evans when he said that colour in photography was “vulgar” while today William Egglestone’s work is regarded as “perfect” and “influential”.
It takes more than changing the context of an image using dramatic light over a dead body and displaying the image in a gallery to be accepted as art. These photographs are truly and undoubtedly work of art but it is in the end a matter of public acceptance and ways of consumption to be legitimate as art.

Bibliography:

Williams, V & Hobson, G (1995) The Dead. Bradford. The National Museum
Chris Townsend (1998) Vile Bodies: Photography and the Crisis of Looking. London. Prestel
Barthes, R (1982) Camera Lucida. New York. Hill And Wang
Fitzpatrick, A (2008) RACAR XXXIII, Reconsidering Dead in Andres Serrano’s The Morgue, University Of Ottawa
Treneman, A (1998) Visual Arts: Vile Bodies. The Independent, 24 March

CM Brosteanu 2011 all rights reserved