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Am I alone in being a little uncomfortable with these pictures?
I can see a purpose to them for the families. I’m not uncomfortable with them as such, although the photographs of the policeman do make me feel….sad I suppose because he, of all of them looks out of place. He ‘should’ be alive. Purely a gut reaction!
Am intrigued by your ‘should’, Jenny! Do you mean that he looks the most living-like?
Do you know the source of your discomfort, dear Kingfisher? Are they a too-public private thing??
I ‘like’ them, in the sense that they remind me of personal post-mortem photographs that I have (including those that I took with my own camera), and how helpful they were, especially in the first flush of post-funeral blues.
Personally I like looking at them. Dead bodies serve as a great momento mori / vitae. And, less obviously, death in my (limited) experience, has a special atmosphere of transcendence and peace. These photos also communicate that to me.
I think my unease is due to not knowing where the photos come from. Why does Gerard Cantinotti have them? Are they used with the permission of the families of these people? The internet is a big scary place, and it only takes these to fall into the wrong person’s hands…
Yes, I’m thinking they should be private I’m afraid.
Kingfisher, I anticipated the response you have articulated, thought hard, and consulted my fellow director before I posted these. We have Gerard’s express approval to post them; we can’t do better than that. We’ve posted post mortem photos before but, because they were so old, the anxieties you express did not come to the surface. It’s the recency of these that makes them so immediate – and, yes, potentially controversial. Having said which, what about the embalmed people we showed last week?
I think perhaps its because he is so young, but yes, he doesn’t look as if he is dead and that is quite…un-nerving.
I take Kingfisher’s point about privacy, but I do see why people would want to do this…its the last thing that you can ‘hold on to’ and in terms of the original Victorian pictures it was often taken as a last opportunity for a family portrait. I entirely understand that. Whether it is useful or ‘healthy’ in the long term is a different debate, I suppose.
I think that funeral and death photography most certainly has its merits for family albums.
Photographs taken for the express intention of public viewing whether in the name of art or science should, I feel, only be allowed if that was the deceased’s written intention before death.
I know we don’t own our body when we die but if permission wasn’t given then decent, human respect for the dead should be paramount.
[…] We had quite a debate recently when we published some recent post mortem photgraphs. […]