ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses some of the research that has led up to and inspired The Roadside Memorial Project, a site-specific art installation on the rural road that leads to author house. It focuses on the work of contemporary artists who have chosen to document the bodily remains of animals killed on the road, in order to question the photographs' potential to awaken an ethical responsiveness in the viewer. Particular attention is paid to photography's historical associations with death and challenging the anthro-pocentrism found throughout traditional photographic theory, how can photography, which has historically been viewed as "an art of the Person". The phenomenon of "road kill" has been around since the advent of automobile transportation. Judith Butler's notion of a "precarious life" is one that we all share as embodied beings, whose lives are dependent on one another and are always vulnerable to injury, violence, and death from the start.
