ABSTRACT
In “Eye and Mind”, Maurice Merleau-Ponty criticizes the photograph for its unnatural halting of time. Roland Barthes echoes this complaint in Camera Lucida, where he observes that the photographic image generally fails to capture a person’s multiple and ceaselessly shifting layers. In spite of these potential limitations, a favored photograph of a deceased companion is often a privileged possession-something many would grab first if forced to flee their homes. Such photographs also figure prominently in many modern memorial practices and rituals. In conversation with the concerns of both Merleau-Ponty and Barthes, this chapter will explore our relationship to the photograph as a means of considering key existential structures pertaining to our mortality. It will ultimately argue that the photograph’s voice may die at exactly the right moment for us to take up the important work of reflecting on and facing our own relationships with dying and grief.
