‘ … and death I think is no parenthesis’: the aged, the ill and the dying in contemporary photographic practice

Abstract

The past few decades have witnessed a proliferation of photographic images (often in photobooks or online) focusing on the aged and the terminally ill. These works cut across different photographic practices, bringing together the documentary, the vernacular and the art photograph. Rather than individual ‘decisive moment’ shots, such works almost always occur in sequences or series, tracking a process whose telos is inevitably death. Following Roland Barthes (2000[1980]), I examine works from this growing photographic genre in light of the ways that loss and imminent death are ensnared in the theorisation of photography itself. Such memento mori might appear to be linked to the indexical nature of photography, in its most literal sense a photochemical process capturing the trace of something inevitably past, and therefore ineluctably lost. However, I argue that even with technological changes in the modes of production and systems of dissemination of images, where the digital paradigm no longer presupposes a necessary link between the photographic and the real, artists working in this genre have adhered to the notion of photography's truth effect, its affinity with the role of witness. After a brief glance at three texts linking photography and death, I probe numerous bodies of work from this genre, sounding their need to rehearse loss of life and its symbolic retrieval, and the complex ways in which memory and oblivion continue to be written into diverse photographic practices.

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