Taking as its starting point the significant role of the photograph in
modern mourning practices--particularly those surrounding public
figures--Dead Matter theorizes the connections between the body and
the image by looking at the corpse as a special instance of a body that
is simultaneously thing and representation. Arguing that the evolving
cultural understanding of photographic realism structures our
relationship to the corpse, the book outlines a new politics of
representation in which some bodies are more visible (and vulnerable) in
death than others.
To begin interpreting the corpse as a representational object referring
to the deceased, Margaret Schwartz examines the association between
photography and embalming--both as aesthetics and as mourning practices.
She introduces the concept of photographic indexicality, using it as a
metric for comprehending the relationship between the body of a dead
leader (including Abraham Lincoln, Vladimir Lenin, and Eva Perón) and
the "body politic" for which it stands. She considers bodies known as
victims of atrocity like Emmett Till and the Syrian boy Hamsa al-Khateeb
to better grasp the ways in which the corpse as object may be called on
to signify a marginalized body politic, at the expense of the social
identity of the deceased. And she contemplates "tabloid bodies" such as
Princess Diana's and Michael Jackson's, asserting that these corpses
must remain invisible in order to maintain the deceased as a source of
textual and value production.
Ultimately concluding that the evolving cultural understanding of
photographic realism structures our relationship to the corpse, Dead
Matter outlines the new politics of representation, in which death is
exiled in favor of the late capitalist reality of bare life.
