Outside the Frame: Reexamining Photographic Representations of Mourning

Abstract

Documentary photographs of war, violence, and death shape the way we think about loss. In this article, I engage with two widely disseminated images of mourning women, deployed to denote the ravages of war and disaster. I argue that the trope of a mourning woman, although undeniably affective, is deeply grounded in the cultural notion of melancholia. While acknowledging Freud's model and its contestations by queer and postcolonial activism, I follow how melancholia in these photographs either absorbs loss into the general economy of compassion or becomes a tool of propaganda within the sanctioned boundaries of patriarchy, nationalism, or neocolonialism. Employing visual and discourse analysis, I point to the cultural mediations surrounding globally broadcast images of mourning women and undermine the monolithic structure of grieving constructed by the political mechanisms that insert female bodies into a universal and manageable narrative. This offers a chance to recognize the photographs of mourning women not as removed from a particular context or taken over by the political agenda, but rather as open-ended, interactive and resilient to closure.

Keywords:

• photography
• gender
• mourning
• melancholia