ABSTRACT
An examination of the manifestation of the death drive in yet another artistic medium, that of photography, will make it possible to point to another facet of the presence of the death drive in culture, one that is specific to this medium. Our psychoanalytic conceptualization of subsistence in a liminal zone draws upon Lacan's treatment, in his seventh seminar, of Sophocles's Antigone as located in the zone between two deaths. In the case at hand, that of photo-painting, the liminal zone lies between the death drive in painting and the death drive in photography. The phenomenon of traversing a zone whose poles are varying manifestations of death may be discerned in the field of the visual arts as well. According to Roland Barthes, then, death is present in the photograph by means of the temporal structure which necessarily assumes a gap between the time of photographic registration and the moment of the observer's death.
