The lives of corpses: Narratives of the image in American memorial photography

Abstract

Our world and history are literally ‘grounded’ on the dead. However, scholarship on the representation and meaning of the corpse is a relatively new, and still marginal, field of study. Have the dead bodies of our fellow human beings disappeared from view or are they too much with us? If we move beyond traditional categories of identity construction focusing solely on living matter, we might find such a phenomenon as the oppression of the corpse and its exclusion as a form of waste. The corpse resists this imposed segregation through a narrative intrinsic to its existence in time, testifying to the overwhelming presence of the shadow, the other side of life. From the vantage point of reason and scientific progress, death can be seen as a form of violence upon both the human body and the community of the living. But this view has not always prevailed. During the nineteenth century, for example, exposure to death was prevalent in daily visual culture. What has changed and how can we follow the evolution of a culture that pathologises death and the corpse? American memorial photography offers us a new perspective in the transformation of the corpse from the familiar to the utterly other.

Keywords:

• post-mortem photography
• funerals
• memorialisation
• cadavers/corpses
• death