Death and Photography
Shirley Samuels P hotography has made visible the obscenity of death for more than 150 years. In the early years, when dead babies were portrayed as if asleep in their mother's arms, the object was to protect memory. In later years, by recording massacres and executions, photographs insisted on a scrutiny at once judicial and memorializing. Because the history of images, especially images of death, enables us to approach their acquired emotional resonance, I want to open my discussion historically. But I dressed this morning as though I were going to a funeral; today's events appear as both elegy and exhortation.