Visual Displays of Death

Abstract

In an increasingly visual world, images of death have attracted considerable attention from scholars interested in how the end of life is displayed in the news. This is of course not surprising, as photographs and films have the ability to show us death, and to directly confront us with its reality. Written or spoken accounts can provide us with graphic details as well, and while they are often gruesome, seeing blood and gore for oneself is a lot more persuasive. We trust photographs and films simply because ‘seeing is believing’. In fact, in today’s world, as Susan Sontag (1977, p. 5) has argued, ‘a photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture’.