CULTURE OF THE SELFIE: SELF-REPRESENTATION IN CONTEMPORARY VISUAL CULTURE
75
used daguerreotypes to record corpses in the mortuary, so he could paint their portraits after death [Lat. post-mortem].284 This practice seemed so common that it was mentioned by Benjamin as well.285 Benjamin wrote down that mortuary photography co-existed with other photographic genres ‘since ever’ for no particular reason, or as he wrote ‘hardly anyone could know the reason why,’ apart from the fact that ‘everyone is doing that’.286 Reason for the expansion of the genre, seen from today’s perspective, can be connected to the limits of technology. Early photography needed a longer exposure, sometimes up to fifteen or even twenty minutes, as in the case of Nadar’s recording of the Paris sewer system, so corpses were more often preferred to be models than humans, as they would be incapable of sitting still. Furthermore, photography enhanced the possibility of research from a distance for newborn disciplines such as forensics, now enhanced to record and analyze the corpse out of the range of its specific smell of decay. Still, the capacity of photography was far from the one of painting that is visible in Robinson’s photograph entitled Lady of Shalott (1861), which has, for example, the same visual motif as the painting Ophelia (1851-2) by pre-raphaelite Millais. In both paintings, a woman floats dead on the river, but while the painting seems realistic, the photograph had hardly any capacity of representing such a scene in a realistic manner. By the 1830s, posing dead became the genre of the epoch, Romanticism, consequently ending in the photographic movement of Pictorialism, besides staging allegoric deaths of heroines, also influenced popular aesthetics that saw death as immortal, beautiful, sans the errors and imperfections of existence. Still, the results of paintings and photographs with the same motifs were hardly comparable at the time. The practice of photographing death reached its peak in the Victorian age. Images commonly featured corpses of deceased children for the reason they never succeeded in getting photographed alive.287 Victorian representations of death and corpses were meant to rather necrophiliacally depict the deceased. However, the corpses were not presented as dead, they were staged as if being alive. Still, in Victorian portraits with the dead, it is quite impossible to grasp if the person is indeed dead, acting as dead or sleeping, as they were set against natural environments, supported by chairs or spine holders.288 Sometimes, they are staged as if asleep. Occasionally, they are dressed in black clothes, lying immobile on the desk, as a piece of meat to be prepared. And very rarely there are coffins, decorated with flowers and candles. Even without them, sometimes, it is possible to recognize death by the surrounding atmosphere; the reactions of others, people assisting the dead, at the same time revealing sadness and disgust. If one looks more carefully, then one can detect the stiffness of the body, eyes half-closed, the gaze unfocused and lips unconcealed, but these occasions are rare. Such Victorian staged photographs served as evidence of life after death, the meeting of two parallel universes of the living and the dead.
284 Benjamin, A Short History of Photography. 285 Benjamin, A Short History of Photography. 286 Benjamin, A Short History of Photography. 287 Peters, in this Victorian fascination with death sees the opposition to contemporary society fascinated with sex which Victorian culture tabooed. Peters, Speaking Into the Air. 288 Visual culture often presented alive beings as the very carriers of death, in the less concrete, rather symbolic, metaphorical and allegoric manner. In many cases, still, it is impossible to figure out if the body photographically represented is indeed dead or alive, as has, for example shown a large debate on Capa’s Falling Soldier (1936).