Abstract: Memento Mori: Mourning, Monuments and Memory explores the relationship between photography, memory and death. The work of Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes and Eduard Cadava is employed to explain the history of the photographic memento mori, or remembrance of death, and the role of this highly technologized art form in this century of mechanised mass death. The second part of the essay explores three types of memorials: the work of Argentinean photographer Marcelo Brodsky, the huge photo realist gravestones of Russian mobsters in Yekaterinburg and the new Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe to be built at the heart of Berlin. Though these examples the themes of the limits of representation, individuality of memory, and various strategies of photographic memorial will be explored.

Abstract: The nineteenth and twentieth centuries bore witness to several wars, natural disasters, and diseases that decimated large amounts of the population. With the invention of the daguerreotype in 1837, the potential to document realistically these demises resulted in forms of portraiture that could more accurately represent particular moments between life, death, and the time after death³. Did the modes of representing illness and death during times of mass devastation evolve between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, or did photography remain a last steadfast resolve through which to hold on to the dead? How did perceptions of death photography change over the centuries? My subjects of interest in this paper are the mortuary and mourning photographs that were produced during the nineteenth century, during a time of diverse and multiple causes of death, such as Tuberculosis, infant death, Syphilis, and other incurable maladies, and the photographic portraits produced in the 1980s, the first ruthless decade of the AIDS epidemic.

I will divide my argument for the similarities and discrepancies between nineteenth century mortuary and posthumous mourning photography and twentieth century PWA (People With AIDS) photography into three sections: Affliction will examine Michel Foucault’s notions of symptoms, the diseased body and epidemiology, followed by Susan Sontag’s claim about the societal construction of HIV/AIDS as a collection of symptoms that results in an HIV/AIDS diagnosis. Foucault and Sontag’s arguments will be inserted into a photographic framework, culminating in Jan Zita Grover and Edmund White’s location of illness in the photographic body and the public and private reasons for depictions of the diseased body. In part two, Execution, I will survey select notions of the function and localization of death within both the human body and the societal body. I will also contextualize Roland Barthes’s notion of the “that has been” in photography in relation to photography depicting death, followed by an historical account of nineteenth century mortuary and posthumous mourning photography and PWA photography of the 1980s in North America, with examples. The third section of my paper, Decay, will discuss the function of photography after disease and death has occurred. The photograph as memorial will be considered, drawing on the theories put forth by Walter Benjamin, Sturken, and Susan Stewart and considering again the public and private uses of the memorial photograph. These three sections will solidify my argument that PWA portraiture of the 1980s draws on the private photographic practices of the nineteenth century to put forth the intimacy of illness and death into the public realm. A fourth section, Rebirth, will provide potential solutions to the problems of the public memorial of the private life.