Introduction: Death in Visual Culture, Visual Cultures of Death

Death’s visualisation, materialisation, and transfiguration permeates cultural expressions. The development of novel technologies and changing social structures following the turn of the nineteenth century—particularly those facilitating new mechanisms of production and consumption—dramatically altered how death was understood, navigated, and communicated. These phenomena have particularly palpable repercussions for the deaths (and, often violent deaths) of the racially and/or socially marginalised. These deaths often extend far beyond the reaches of the body and the immediate aftermath of an individual’s life. Replayed, reimagined, and recontextualized through creative production, commercialization, the dissemination and mass consumption of images, and through the display of the medicalized body as specimen, such visual and material expressions perpetuate and even reiterate complex social issues.

This special issue of Mortality was inspired by a panel that we co-chaired for the 2021 College Art Association of America (CAA) Conference, which was held virtually that February against the complicated backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic. The panel sought out papers exploring how trauma, social transformations, political shifts, and emergent cultural concerns informed the ways in which death has been materially interpreted and communicated in the modern era. We were particularly interested in investigations into death’s social manifestations that offered insight into the everyday reconciliation with and/or resistance to mortality, trauma, political violence and oppression, climate crisis, and various other phenomena.

Our initial call for papers resulted in several high-quality submissions—too many to be included in the conference panel itself—demonstrating the timeliness of this topic and the necessity to explore it more deeply. In the weeks following the conference, we hosted an online event in collaboration with the Collective for Radical Death Studies entitled ‘Observing Mortality: A Conversation on Death and Visual Culture.’¹ This event, which attracted nearly one hundred live viewers from around the globe, featured our four original panellists—Jessica M. Dandona, Mlondi Zondi, A. Maggie Hazard, and Belinda Q. He—in a discussion about the ethics of displaying the dead and human remains and of observing violent death. Considering matters of consent and objectification in the creation, dissemination and consumption of visual material ranging from anatomical models to execution photographs and images of police brutality, these scholars offered their insights into the use of racially and socioeconomically disenfranchised death in art and visual media.

The field of death studies is an inherently interdisciplinary line of inquiry, traditionally drawing on methodologies from the fields of anthropology, history, sociology, psychology, and cultural studies, broadly defined. Though often centred in material culture or object studies, art and visual culture remain marginal, albeit growing, interests among death studies scholars. Studies on the art of death and dying, too, often remain rooted in studies of white European and US experiences, images, and objects with a large body of scholarship available on, for example, funerary art and visual cultures in the US, the UK, and France that are not only disproportionately white, but also disproportionately representative of a socioeconomic elite (see, e.g., Ariès, 1981 & 1983; Etlin, 1984; Sloane, 1991; Le Normand-Romain, 1995; Jalland, 1996; Ben Amos, 2000; Lindsay, 2012). Though survival bias and other prejudices have long been at the root of these narrow focuses, several recent book-length studies have begun dismantling these elite, predominantly white narratives towards more robust and diverse analyses of death and visibility (see, e.g., Amanik & Fletcher, 2020; Amadei, 2022; Morton & Akehurst, 2023; Alexander, 2024).

Adjacent but intimately intertwined, the subject of trauma pervades scholarship addressing the intersection of death, material culture, art, and the broader visual sphere. The valences of trauma in the context of visual and material culture are engaged through multiform strategies across interdisciplinary fields including performance studies; postcolonial and decolonial studies; African and African American studies; feminist, gender, and queer studies; as well as art history and visual culture; to name just a few. Scholars in this special issue expand on elements at the intersection of death, traumatic experience, colonial history, and race through both the personal and the collective. The essays are in conversation with scholarship that locates the body as the material through which to read the enduring marks of violence (see, e.g., Duggan, 2017; Pollock, 2009; Stiles, 2016; Taylor, 2003;), scholarship that explores witnessing and absence as expressions of trauma (Lanzmann, 1991; Mato, 2023), critical explorations of emotional affect in response to both physical and epistemic violence (see, e.g., hooks, 1996; Kincaid, 2000), theories of the collective aspects of trauma resulting from state violence and disaster (see, e.g., Butler, 2009; Hirsch, 2012), and the role of visuality and the aesthetics of representing trauma (see, e.g., Batchen, Gidley, Miller, and Prosser, 2012; Cornejo, 2024; Marriott, 2000 & 2016; Pedri-Spade, 2017; Saltzman and Rosenburg, 2006; Tsinhnahjinnie, 2009).

The articles in this issue address issues related to death, its visualisation and display, from the nineteenth century to the present, and represent a wide range of cultural contexts including topics situated in Colombia, Puerto Rico, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and South Africa. Mediums explored likewise range from anatomical specimens to photographs, drawings, and installation art. In some cases, the scholars engage with challenging cases of violent death, social death, and collective trauma—the visualisation and display of which is itself often a violation of the deceased. Critically, the contributors address questions of who has or should have the authority to visualise and display the dead, who consents for the dead and their image, and how meaning is made through such visual displays.

The issue opens with ‘The foetus in the museum: personhood, pregnancy, and anatomical preparations,1880–1900’ in which Jessica M. Dandona analyses foetal anatomical preparations at the turn of the twentieth century, a period in which obstetrics was beginning to supplant midwifery as the preferred—and medicalised—means of prenatal care. Considering historical and contemporary viewership, Dandona draws distinctions between wet specimens, which often highlighted congenital anomalies, and mounted or disarticulated skeletons used to teach foetal development or scale. In doing so, Dandona discusses the socioeconomic and educational implications these preparations had in the history of obstetrics as well as their public use and reception in medical museums today. Drawing on Roland Barthes’s notion of the punctum, Dandona highlights the specimens’ ‘complex relationship to time’ (Dandona, 2024, p. 231 & 251) that implicate them not only in the medicalisation of pregnancy, but also in discourse over abortion, medical authority, and medical consent over time and through politics of display.

Continuing to examine the ethics of viewing and display, Mlondolozi Zondi’s article, ‘Culture’s photodermic enjoyment,’ scrutinises works by US-based South African artist Paul Stopforth, raising questions about the aestheticization of death in pursuit of ideological goals. Zondi’s essay interrogates the philosophical, artistic, and political contexts around Stopforth’s artistic re-presentation of the brutalised body of Stephen Biko, South African anti-apartheid activist and leader of the Black Consciousness Movement, following his murder by South African police forces in 1977. In conversation with philosopher David Marriott’s concept of the photodermic, Zondi navigates profound questions about the investment in scopophilic (e.g., the derival of sexual pleasure from looking) evidence of anti-Black violence, particularly in the face of violently repressive regimes.²

The next two articles consider art as expressions of public grief in the face of state violence. Jamie DiSarno’s article, ‘We find the front everywhere: grievability and the proximity of social and anonymous death in Doris Salcedo’s “Plegaria Muda,”’ analyses the ethics of acknowledging violence in Colombian artist Doris Salcedo’s installation Plegaria Muda (2008-2010) and its ruminations on the underpinnings of systematised state violence. DiSarno explores and historicizes the dialogue Salcedo establishes between marginalised communities in the city of Los Angeles, California, and the nation of Colombia through the lens of Judith Butler’s ‘grievability,’ interweaving themes of social and physical death, poverty, violence, and invisibility. Then, in ‘Art as protest and memorialisation: a survey of local and diasporic responses to Hurricane María,’ Stella M. Ramírez Rodríguez examines forms of visual protest against the necromáquina (necromachine) of the Rosselló and Trump administrations in the aftermath of Hurricane María. Considering the influence of traditional Taíno conceptions of and attitudes toward death on contemporary Puerto Rican funerary practices (e.g., ‘extreme’ embalming and baquinés [community celebrations that honour a deceased child]), Ramírez Rodríguez addresses the impact that disinformation, mismanagement of the dead, and failing island infrastructure and telecommunications had on local and diasporic grieving processes. As Ramírez Rodríguez demonstrates, several artistic interventions centred around the number 4,645—the popularly accepted death toll of Hurricane María—facilitated memorialisation of the dead and communal mourning as protest against the necromáquina.

The final two contributions address collective trauma, memories of war, and memorialization. Eleanor O’Keeffe’s ‘Radical histories, emotional legacies, and everywhere in between? Exploring everyday responses to the traumas of war in Blood Swept Lands & Seas of Red (2014)’ examines the public art installation—Blood Swept Lands & Seas of Red—that marked the First World War Centenary by setting 888,246 ceramic poppies in the Tower of London’s moat to represent British and colonial fatalities during the war. Through staff, volunteers, and visitors interviews, O’Keeffe reflects on the interconnectedness of heritage and participatory design, cultural memory, and the ‘experience economy.’ In doing so, O’Keeffe positions Blood Swept Lands & Seas of Red as an example of what Pierre Nora referred to as a lieu de mémoire (site of memory), but also a site of multi-dimensional mourning—’of wars historic and recent, domestic, and global’ (O’Keeffe, 2024, p. 306 & 329). Concluding this issue, SaeHim Park considers the visual and narrative aesthetics of the genre-bending, fantasy-documentary film The Pregnant Tree and the Goblin (2019) as an experimental methodological framework for ethical memorialization. The Pregnant Tree and the Goblin is both a story about histories of sexual violence perpetrated by US military service members against local women in South Korean camp-towns as well as a self-conscious examination of the kinds of violence perpetuated by academic and documentary recountings of past trauma. Park adopts recalcitrance as a framework for understanding how the film addresses sexual violence and social death, emphasizing the enduring effects of trauma over more familiar but often hasty narratives of resistance and healing.

Thematic questions about the purpose and meaning of memorialising as well as the ethics of looking are woven throughout this collection of essays, registering at different levels and across geographic, cultural, political, and socioeconomic contexts. While the texts here largely address death in the context of violence—be it through violent acts perpetrated by people and institutions or by so-called natural disasters—the authors are more deeply attuned to how responses to death in art and visual culture might activate a viewership personally, collectively, and/or politically. Together, these essays touch on just a selection of potential contexts in which visual culture offers a point of entry into decentering whiteness, colonial paradigms, or otherwise oppressive systems working against communal and individual grieving processes. In centering visual culture as a means for evaluating and understanding subversive deathways, this issue offers sousveillance as a framework through which to evaluate the aesthetics of necropolitical resistance.

Notes

1. “Observing Mortality: A Conversation on Death and Visual Culture,” The Collective for Radical Death Studies, 23 February 2021, video, 1:02:56, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lDMfZLIz7D0. To learn more about the Collective for Radical Death Studies, visit https://www.radicaldeathstudies.com.

2. The term ‘photodermic,’ as theorised by David Marriott, means to ‘sublimate [and] retard signs of decay and decomposition by countering the subject’(s) life into still life, dead fantasies’ (Marriott, 2000, p. 37).