Death (in the Eye) of the Beholder: An Encounter with Victorian Post-mortem Photography

This article deals with the earliest version of post-mortem photography concentrating on the effects of such pictures on the present-day viewer. The encounter with these artefacts begins from a phenomenological point of view as I try to describe my personal experience of coming face to face with the image. I claim that the relation between the perceiver and the photograph does not just simply change but remains constantly vacillating between the modes of life and death. The shock of this constant oscillation is explained in terms of the opening of the Lacanian Real, of the subject turning into an abject/object which enacts the perceiver’s own constant (wish and) fear as well as marks the re-emergence of the aspect of our psyche from which the cultural and the symbolic protect us.