The Sweet Forever: How Photography in the Wake of Digital Transformation Might Inform a Re-imagining of Death

Abstract

For nearly 200 years, photography has been intrinsically interconnected with death through a range of scientific, medical, technological, cultural, social and personal practices, including its historic use as a medium for conveying imagined representations of the 'living dead' in early analogue spirit photography. Today, extraordinary new discoveries about the process of dying have emerged through scientific and technological innovation in resuscitation. These allow humankind to re-evaluate and re-imagine the entity commonly known as 'consciousness' as continuing to persist in the period beyond death. However, despite this seismic transformation in the medical understanding of the process of dying and its potential to change our approach to both life and death in Western culture, mainstream secular beliefs about death remain deeply rooted to the pre-existent Cartesian-Newtonian theory that consciousness is the creation of the brain and, as such, terminates at the time of physical death. My practice-led research considers how awareness of such transformative new understandings of the dying process might also transform not only our belief systems around death, but also the way we picture death, dying, and the dead. Through creative practice I explore how photography in the wake of digital transformation might inform a contemporary re-imagining of death and dying. By using a range of methods I re-approach historic visual illusion technologies to newly evoke 'immaterial' subjects. By investigating the powerful dichotomy of photography, which is simultaneously a scientific index of truth and a machine of illusion, my research questions the assumed boundary between life and death. My personal investigation of death and dying through photography is paralleled with a text-based investigation of wider understandings of death in our society through the personal letters of a diverse range of people in my community. Taken together both my creative visual practice, and my work with people's letters, forms a contribution to the field of death studies, and to our continually evolving imagining of death and dying in the twenty first century.