“The Uniqueness of Its Figure”: Photographs of Corpses in War Reporting

Since its invention, the medium of photography has been used to record, freeze, embalm, and preserve. Just as death stiffens the face and congeals the blood, photographs fix the body-mimicking the motionless, mute corpse. Theorists have drawn cultural parallels between the process of embalming, and postmortem photography in the mid-nineteenth century-for example in memorial portraits of the dead, sometimes in lifelike poses, and in cartes de visite (Burns, 1990; Burns and Burns, 2002; Linkman, 2011; Ruby, 1995). These two technologies helped to shape modernity’s relationship to the corpse; preserving representations of the deceased served to express care of the bereaved and to forestall liminality, alleviating the fear of death (Bazin, 2005; Troyer, 2007).1