Photographing Death

Death functioned as a marginal theme in the photographic culture of Victorian Britain, acknowledged to the extent that it could rely on an established language of death-related symbolism to communicate its message to a Victorian audience. Whether documented by private post mortem photography or explored in photographic art, death provided an exclusive entrée into aesthetic sublimity. Photographing Death examines how both the studio photographer and the art photographer presented an idealised version of the corpse, with few reminders of the physical facts of death. Whether given moralising undertones or attributed symbolism that signified spiritual purity, the results were always the deliberately manipulated children of their makers: the photographers.