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Passing through Being
Now it's many years that presumably death has exited our daily lives.
Graveyards have retreated from the cities. In fact, it is only the
representation of the pictures of the dead people and the picture of
death that we face with, and confrontation with the reproduced picture
of death plays the most important role in augmenting our sense of
immortality. Actually, hiding of death in daily life and its reflection
in the pictures makes its very being more unbelievable. And this very
characteristic of the connection of one single moment with death makes
the simplest pictures apt to endless interpretations and joins death
with picture.
Christian Metz believes that photography connects to death in many ways.
"the first way emerges when we contemplate on the common use of
photography: that is preserving memories; this could be another way:
though we ourselves are alive, the moment which has been recorded in the
photograph is dead and the person who existed at the time of
photography, does not exist anymore. The nature of the photograph is
silence and inaction. A photograph is the memento of death". Roland
Barthes in his book 'La chambre claire: note sur la photographie' calls
the photographers the 'agents of death' and the photography, 'a sudden
leap in true death' in modern societies. Barthes and Metz are not the
only critics who refer to the relation of photography and death, Susan
Sontag also believes, "all the photographs are involved in recording the
memory of one moment. Taking a photograph is somehow participating in
death".
And now, as if the photograph is a mirror that we see ourselves in; not
in that specific moment, but more aged or younger, in a way that the
passing of time between the moment of taking photograph and the present
time is emphasized. The opening and closing of shutter, takes the
subject to another world; to a timeless world; now a new reality is born
and the photograph leads us to pass through being….
Amir Hosein Sanaei
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