I am currently undertaking my Ph.D. at the University of Central Lancashire with the key focus on utilising self-portrait photography to examine the contemporary fear and understanding of dying through the lens of abjection. This project utilises practice-based research and Autotheory to provide a new perspective of discussing dying that is not heard within thanatological circles, namely the stories of those who wish to understand dying but are not terminally ill, bereaved, ageing, or work with the dying. Often these voices are silenced through sociological pressures, that it is morbid and something not to worry about.
I disagree and believe we should all talk about it.
Title: The In/Visible Dying; Experiencing and Viewing Contemporary Dying Through Embodied Self-Portrait Photography Practice
“Consigned to a life in which we know with certainty that we will die, but prevented from securing an image of how or when the event will occur, we often use photographic images of the dead and dying as a way to help us imagine our own deaths.”
(Phlean, 2002)
Within this practice-based research, I will explore the relationship of the contemporary viewing of dying and understanding of mortality by providing a personal autotheoretical account of my experience of both fearing and needing to understand dying, even as someone who is healthy. Using self-portrait photography to provide a method of examining dying as the subject and observer, providing a space of experience and viewing. This research will negotiate contemporary visual culture and thanatology (the study of death and, specifically within this research, dying) to examine how the dying are viewed within contemporary western society and how these depictions form the contemporary understanding of dying and mortality.
To frame this research, I will be utilising Lacan framework of the three orders - the imaginary, symbolic, and real - and Kristeva's theories of abjection and jouissance that disrupt and breakdown these boundries. These will be used to analyse the creation and viewing of photographic self-portraits, particularly in relation to the visual exchange between subject and viewer when challenging boundaries of understanding. This approach seeks to bring unique insights to visual thanatological research by focusing on the lived experience of negotiating understanding dying and mortality.
Thought the creation of photographic artifacts this research aims to examine and discuss the visual exposure to dying and the effects this could have on the development of personal understanding of dying, using my own experience and relationship with dying as a basis of critical reflection. Combining with photographic self-portraiture as a method of performance, exposure, and examination on the contemporary viewing of the dying. In doing do, I seek to bring unique knowledge to visual thanatological research that focuses upon the lived experience of negotiating understanding dying and mortality, by providing a framework for critical and creative inquiry that can contribute to new ways of thinking about mortality and dying.
It is apt to specify that this project is focused upon naturally dying, defined as the bodily process leading to dead, or final cessation. This is the moment where the subject is in a state of limbo of being neither “living” nor (clinically)dead.
Whilst we are in a culture where the spectacle of death and dying is highly visible within contemporary media, notably within television and film, “[d]eath can only be known to the living through its images; in that sense, death is always spectacular, while it eludes any vision we have of it” (Connolly, 2011, p 1). These hyper realised and dramatized depictions are far removed from the real deaths of loved ones we would witness within the home. We now develop an understand of what is to be mortal and to die through the safety of constructed imagery. Mey explains that;
“In the absence of public or private occasions to directly encounter mortality (other than one’s own), and of other moments that support an immediate experiencing and understanding of death, we turn to representations of dying and decease. These function as a substitute for the intractability and thus lack of experience and comprehension of our finitude.” (Mey, 2016, p 148)
Through this mediated, often artificial, viewing how we now come to understand what is means to be mortal and to die has been disrupted. Creating a gulf between the living and the dying where there is no shared space or relationship between the two, “our profound lack of understanding only fuels a desire for a new experience of mortality, even if such a desire is unconscious and we’re not quite sure how to satisfy it” (Pustay, 2021, p 31). This raises the question of how can we bridge this gap of experience and viewing dying outside of the spectacular dying and death within contemporary media?
In this practice-based research, an autotheoretical lens will be employed, which, as Fournier (2021) explains, involves "using firsthand experience as a person living in the world as the ground for developing and honing theoretical arguments and theses" (p. 35). This approach is distinct from autoethnography, where personal experience is used to examine cultural phenomena. The use of autotheory is a deliberate choice as it allows the artist and researcher to embody themselves within the research process and engage with the theoretical frameworks being employed to examine the resulting works objectively. According to Brown et al. (2011), autotheory provides a means for expressing embodied emotions, feelings, sensations, and engagement with the world and other modalities. Through the creation of self-portrait photographic images, where the researcher will act as subject, photographer, and viewer, the limits of the human body and mind can be explored to gain insight into different aspects of the relationship between the self and mortality. As Obernyer (2019) notes, this approach allows for a more nuanced exploration of the subject matter, enabling the researcher to delve deeper into their own experiences and emotional responses to the topic.
Engaging with Julia Kristeva’s theory of the abject, where the meaning of order and self are disrupted, the images produced will challenge the boundary of understanding between living and dying. This aims to separate the “self” from the body and turn it “other”, to symbolically mimic the process of when one is seen as actively dying, “whose life is undistinguishedable from the symbolic: (Kristeva, 1982, p. 109). Through this shock of viewing, I seek to create a moment of jouissance, a joy of understanding and realisation of mortality that would normally be experienced at the bedside of the dying where, “a recognition that to die is not necessarily the culmination of our fears, but also often the answer to our prayers.” (Pustay, 2022, p. 18)
Research Question
This PhD projects seeks to answer –
Can self-portrait photography create an embodied experience of dying through participation, manipulation, and viewing as to explore the complexities of mortality within a society where exposure to physical dying is no longer available?
Objectives:
To investigate how self-portraiture photography been used by other contemporary practitioners to examine their mortality, noting their methods, motivations, and how they disseminate their imagery.
To investigate how Kristeva’s notion of abjection and jouissance are used to examine mortality and dying within photographic portraits, considering the effect of these upon the artist and the viewers.
Apply the resulting understanding of abjection and jouissance in the creation of the photographic self-images.
To investigate how dying is viewed within contemporary visual culture, and how this forms an understanding of mortality.
To develop a practice-based autotheoretical account of exploring and engaging with creating self-images of dying.
Contexts:
Contemporary Visual Culture of Death
Contemporary visual culture seeks to understand the world within the visual frame, it “echoes the problems we face in our daily lives: how to act, how to think, what to believe.” (Godfrey, 2021). When thinking about the visual culture of death and dying we must consider not only the images on display, but how and why they are displayed within the manner? How are the death and dying being represented or constructed.
Artists, such as Araya Rasdjarmrearnsook who’s film The Class (2005) creates a space to interact with the forgotten dead and challenge the viewers sense of mortality, explore the experiences of themselves or others, moments of life or disaster that are continuously happening in the world at the time; “it reflects the complex issues that shape our diverse, global, and rapidly changing world… they often raise difficult or thought-provoking questions without providing easy answers.” (‘What Is Contemporary Art?’, 2022). Though her film, Rasdjarmrearnsook is telling a story not only to the corpses at her feet, but to the viewers, however, whilst the dead are present within the screen, they remain covered and unseen, a decision of the artist to control their image and “protect” the viewer.
Steven Pustay proposes that with the advent of the motion picture and advancement of modern medicine how we view death was fundamentally uprooted (Pustay, 2021), leading to the social visibility of death and dying being moved to facilities, hospitals, and hospices. Pustay suggests, “that ability to look suddenly and violently disappeared. No longer deemed necessary or even respectable to witness the passing of others, yet anxieties regarding death never waned and the desire to look upon its face never diminished.” (2021, p 1). He goes on to explore how contemporary media become the driving vehicle to fulfil the need to look at the dead and dying to understand mortality on a human level. However, this brings to question the effect of these depictions, fact or fiction, has upon the public subjectivity of death.
This is distinction between the fictional and real dead are clearly defined within the visual space, the public must be prepared for, in the words of a news anchor, ‘what they are about to witness may be distressing’. This highlights the true attitudes towards the dead within society where “[t]he actual corpse requires distance and respect even the death desensitised society” (Penfold-Mounce, 2015) in order to clearly separate the nature of the dead upon display and that to see the real, true dead is shocking. This display is only acceptable when it does not cause any emotional pain, where they do not “create a situation where we imagine the circumstances of our own deaths or the death of those we love” (O’Neil, 2011, p 300).
However, there is a starkly different, almost visceral response when this safe viewing is disrupted with uncensored imager and within spaces not associated with the dying. There is an ongoing discussion of the sensitivities of viewing death and dying, highlighting the visual culture society sees as acceptable. Hirschhorn comments on this through his works, explaining,
“it’s necessary to distinguish ‘sensitivity’, which means to me being ‘awake’ and ‘attentive’, from ‘hypersensitivity’, which means ‘self-enclosure’ and ‘exclusion’. To resist ‘hypersensitivity’, it is important to look at those images of mutilated human bodies.” (Hirschhorn, 2012)
Self-Portrait Photography
Self-portrait photography is unique as it requires the artist to take on multiple roles, becoming subject, photographer, and observer. This provides a unique experience of being able to examine the image making from both sides of the camera, physically participating, and placing their body into the visual and cultural discourse. By placing their body within the screen of the photographic image the artist allows themselves to become other, an object, something that can be analysed and observed from a distance to gain new understanding of their body/self within a space.
The photographic image forms its own temporal space of time and subjectivity, where the boundary between the past and present can then become a vehicle for the abject death/dying to be viewed by both the author and the external viewer. This is due to “the disruption of time of the photographic medium as well as its essential visuality enables a different way of thinking about death” (Joost, 2013).
Within Camera Lucida Barthes describes being the subject within the photographic image, “I am neither subject nor object but a subject who feels he is becoming an object: I then experience a micro-version of death… I am truly becoming spectre” (Barthes, 1981). The role of the artist within the frame acts as a symbolic object of the dying for the viewer, removing elements that we could use to recognise them as human and living, thus making them other to the living.
Through this performance the artist navigates the barrier of life/dying through the screen of the photograph, while the act of looking challenges the viewer’s (both the artists and an external audience) perception of mortality. The artists to surrender to dying as a living being in front of the camera, first by performing dying, the second being the reflective meditation upon their own body through the post-production process.
The stillness of photography, particularly when contemplating images of ourselves or people we know, disrupts the continuous stream of our lived experience and, in doing so, emphasises not only our temporality but also our finiteness. It therefore evokes the passage of time and eventually death. (Joost, 2013)
Magda Hueckel to try both visualise and familiarise her fear of illness, aging, and death. Through her images she repeatedly examines parts of her body with almost forensic detail, distorting the results by overlaying them with images of decayed and dying flowers. This causes an almost premature aging and decay of her body by creating uneven textures and tones throughout, thus bringing her fears and obsession into the visual field and making them almost physically tangible and not only in the artist’s mind. Phelan echoes this sentiment when examining the photographic self-portraits of Francesca Woodman, "At once animated by the cable and arrested by the moment of exposure, Woodmen's self-portrait is poised between the life and death drives" (Phelan, 2002, p 997), though she goes further, proposing that the process of these self-images, from the performance to the development, is a method of rehearsing death (Phelan, 2002).
Performance that is inherent with self-portrait photography plays a role for not only the image making but as the moment of embodiment for the author, Julius writes, “performances also prepare us for death by breaking down the traditional boundaries that exist between self and other” (Julius, 2021).
Abjection and Jouissance
Through this practice-based research I will be drawing on the theory of the Abject and it’s sibling, jouissance, to examine the reaction and effect of viewing images of “dying”. Julia Kristeva presents the idea of Abjection as something that “disturbs identity, system, order.” (Kristeva, 1982, p 4), it is a threat of meaning, the self, and order. When confronted the abject causes reactions of violent disgust, horror, or fear, it is a danger to the boundaries or order, and we must be protected. Described as the “utmost of abjection” (Kristeva, 1982) the corpse is seen as “death infecting life” (Kristeva, 1982), the inanimate lifeless shell lies beyond the border of our understanding of living, threatening our existence. It is abject and other.
Within my practice I will be using the abject to separate my self from my body within the image, making myself other to objectively view myself and examine my thoughts of dying. Within the act of viewing myself as dying, I am confronted with my abject, “at the limits of my condition as a living being. In relation to these limits, my body detaches itself as a living being… It is no longer me who expels, ‘I’ is expelled.” (Kristeva, 1982, p 127)
By submitting to the abject, the viewer can experience a moment of jouissance, a painful healing fulfilment where they recognise their self and the other within the image, forming a moment of understanding of their abject, in this case their fear or repulsion of dying. Kristeva describes this moment of jouissance as “a repulsive gift that the Other, having become alter ego, drops so the “I” does not disappear in it but finds, in that sublime alienation, a fortified existence.” (Kristeva, 1982). The abject becomes a form of catharsis (Wark, 2016), a moment of realisation and familiarity where new knowledge and understanding can form, where the abject other is no longer in control. When witnessing dying was part of life the experience of viewing came with both trauma and jouissance, helping to form our knowledge and understanding of mortality (Pustay, 2021). This project aims to create this moment that is now lacking within contemporary viewing.
Methodology
This research project will be utilising an autotheoretical methodology, designed to place the artists/authors lived experience at the centre of the research, using both art making and theorising to be self-reflexive. Through this practice researchers are able to “process and transform the discourse and frameworks of theory through their embodied practices and relational lives." (Fournier, 2021, p68). By using the lived experience, the researcher can place their body and perspectives within the larger context of the fields they are writing on (Zwartjes, 2019b), in this case the visual socio-political context of mortality and dying.
Through the creation of self-portrait photographs I will be embodying the experience of examining mortality and dying, visually placing my body within the discourse of contemporary visual dying. Through the photographic medium I will be able to engage more openly, as explained by Joost;
“Some photographers are acutely aware of the crucial temporality of the photographic medium and thematise death and mortality by evoking temporality and finitude. This is to say that these photographic explorations of death, based on the particularity of the photographic medium, open up a discourse on death in an authentic manner.” (Joost, 2013)
Sorin and Vallas (2017) explain that “the writing of one’s own death, has provided a useful framework for the theorists interested in the relationships between writing, the self and death”. In this instance, the “writing” is the performance and creation of self-portrait photographs, the “embodied experience can become another text, framework, or catalyst” (Fournier, 2021, p 35) in which issues can be contextualised and thought through.
Ulldemolins, Pint, and Sels (2021) addresses the development of autotheory and how it places the space, environment, and body of the artists experience at the centre of the research and examine the effects.
Autotheory picks up the thread of existential phenomenology, very much invested in the embodied, singular relation to the everyday world... [w]hat autotheory does, and does more explicitly than existential phenomenology, is explore these modes, or moments, of existence that deviate from the so considered default, neutral position of an ideal... Taking seriously the affectedness of a body also means including affects that are disturbing, overwhelming, and sometimes too close for comfort. (Ulldemolins, Pint and Sels, 2021, p6)
This autotheoretical account will use practice-based research methods where the qualitative data will be produced by creating photographic artefacts to form the basis of new knowledge contributions. This method was chosen as it allows the role of the lived experience and memory to be “agents in knowledge construction” (Sullivan, 2006, p24) by encompassing in the artists bodily engagement critically. Through the continual development of artefacts, I will be engaging in a reflexive analytical approach, continually measuring the value and impact of the work as it is produces and in relation to where it is shown.
By identifying my fears of dying and mortality as a base for exploring the discourse of visual dying, I plan to put surrender myself/body, putting them in the same space as my fear through the screen of the camera, momentarily giving up control and capturing this in an image.
I will be engaging in a process of making my body abject using the frame works of Lacan and Kristeva, dehumanising myself until I become other and disrupting my idea of mortality. This process will consider different methods of in-camera and post-production techniques, including multiple exposure, digital manipulation, and physical destruction to images and film. In this way I will be performing a symbolic autopsy upon myself, using my form as a site to examine and visualise myself as if dying though production and post-production techniques. Within these images I refer to Jenks who notes “the visible and invisible interior of the body where light is thrown only in death, i.e., only through the autopsy which opened up a space where bodies and eyes could meet.” (Jenks, 2017). Through using technologies to alter time, speeding up the dying process, a “transformation of a who into a what” (Ortega, 2019) as to objectively and visualise the boundaries of the living and dying. These will be designed to hold the viewers’ attention, engaging them to think of how they previously viewed the dying and their ideas of mortality.
Key themes to be explored through the development of work include:
· The medicalisation of dying, as something that needs to be cured.
· The physical dying process, changes within the body not witnessed.
· The need to control the body, where I view illness and dying as my body rebelling and uncontrollable.
· My experience of communicating about my thoughts and fears of dying.
Throughout self-portrait photography will be used to create situations to investigate these elements of dying, to actively engage within the subject and thus create a space to critically examine the relationship between subjectivity and the representation of dying.
To counteract the limitations that can occur within self-reflexive methods I will draw on the application of a “creative analytical process (CAP) ethnography” as proposed by Skains (2018). This will include the employment of a research jog, field notes, and continuing draft materials, linking together the creative and analytical processes throughout the project development. Through the reflexive process these supporting materials will offer “opportunity for insight and nuance into the creative practice through a necessarily subjective record.” (Skains, 2018, p87).
This project will explore in more detail the other artists of whom have used self-portrait photography as a method of examining mortality and dying. This will highlight not only the creative methods used but draws focus on, if published, their motivations for examining their mortality or the questions they were asking. This analysis will encompass visual frameworks of semiotics, abjection, gaze, and repetition to examine these images and the effect of the artist and their body within the frame, asking if these images are able to produce a moment of visual dying.
Key features and themes of these selected images are (but not limited to): duplication of the artist within the image, the artist within a medical setting or using medicine as a theme, the disappearance or fading of the artist, tight cropping to remove the identity or distinction of the body, post-production manipulation, and placing the artist with physical death (e.g. bones, organs, etc.) I will then use the findings to aid in informing my own practice, placing my body within the sphere of visual dying.
References
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2. Barthes, R. (1993) Camera lucida. London: Vintage.
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Statement of Originality
This practice-based PhD offers an original and unique contribution to the fields of contemporary visual culture and thanatology, focusing on the application of self-portraiture photography to create visual embodied artifacts addressing how the dying are viewed within contemporary western culture and how this effects the development of understanding mortality. Through the application of an autotheoretical methodology, this research also aims to expand the use of autotheory within visual research, embodying the researcher within the work.