Chapter 5 The Undead: Necromancy and the Inner World

I am looking at a photograph. It carries the signs we have come to recognise as meaning ‘from the past’. Sepia tones, clothes from another era, and a certain pose—somehow formal, stern, a bit distant. It is a pose common in early photographs, stemming from the need to keep still for the long exposure; or was there a certain gravity associated with the task? In any case, the image before me in London’s National Portrait Gallery is a photograph of a family. The small child in the overstuffed chair lacks the aggressive face of a modern child, no squirming away or making fun. Indeed, the child looks asleep…until it hits you. That fully dressed, posed-for-a-portrait child, is dead.

In the early years of photography, the surge of new processes (daguerreotype, calotype, gelatin emulsion) was matched by a rush of new subjects: travel sites, war reportage, pornography, police files, and by the 1860s, millions of family portraits. The poet Elizabeth Barret wrote, ‘I would rather have such a memorial of the one I dearly loved, than the noblest artist’s work ever produced’ (1843; in Upton, 1976, p. 10). Photographs of the dead would become a staple of the time, placed on gravestone, mantlepiece, or in the family album—the deceased often posed among family and friends. A memorial is a form of memory, or rather it is a grievance against memory; it is a plea, a tonic to counter memory’s propensity to fade. Susan Sontag noted that ‘photographs are not so much an instrument of memory as an invention of it or a replacement’ (Sontag, 1977). We photograph something that we hope to hold onto, ‘to catch in our hands’. Yet how do we catch hold of death?

Looking may be a way of capturing that which cannot be held. Wish, phantasy, imagination, and memory have a common root in the eye’s grasp at our elusive world. They are second looks at the spot where something was, but now no longer is. And what better second look than a photograph that captures an instant of time, a frozen mo