REPRESENTATION OF DEATH EXPERIENCE IN THE S.SALGADO’S CREATIVE HERITAGE
DOI: 10.23951/2312-7899-2020-2-74-90
This article addresses the specific features of visualization of death in the 20th century on the example of the photographic heritage of Sebastião Salgado. Studying death as one of the key elements of collective consciousness French scholar Ph. Aries distinguishes five historical periods of development and modification of the attitude towards death. XX century is tragically known for its numerous wars and dramatic events resulting in massive loss of life and - following the scholar - became the time of “reversed death”. Displacement of death to the periphery of social and cultural life which was noted by Aries, shows the feeling of fear of death which became not worth mentioning taboo. The effort to distance ourselves from death leads to the fact that death becomes available only with help of various indirect methods such as photography. Mediatization of death allows to create a feeling of control over that phenomenon. In creative works of widely known Brazilian photographer S. Salgado one can identify a number of different series dedicated to visualization of mortality. Photo images of death created by the Brazilian photographer become a projection and conceptualization of death. Looking at photo series from South and Central Africa and America one can conclude that the image of death – the central theme of Salgado’s work – gets various ways of representation. The main ways of representation of death became aestheticization and the quest for abstract context for which his works are seriously criticized. The photographic heritage of Sebastião Salgado became an important link between documentary photography of wartime involuntarily filled with images of death and virtual images of death in modern media.
Keywords: photography, death, mortality, Salgado, representation
References:
Aries, P. (1977) L’Homme devant la mort. P.
Aries, P. (1992) L'Homme devant la mort. Transl. into Russian. Moscow.
Benjamin, V. (1996) Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit. Transl. into Russian by S.A.Romashko. Moscow.
Cartier-Bresson, A. (2015) Voir est un tout. Transl. into Russian. Saint-Petersburg.
Chapnick, G. (2016) Truth Needs No Ally: Inside Photojournalism. Transl. into Russian. Saint-Petersburg.
Debray, R. (2010) Introduction à la médiologie. Transl. into Russian by B. M. Skuratov. Moscow.
Eremeeva, S. (2018) Bob leaves Alice: Ars Moriendi in the digital age. Archaeology of Russian Death. Vol. 6. Pp. 52-70. (In Russian).
Gurevich, A. Ya. (1992) Philippe Aries: Death as a Problem of Historical Anthropology. In: Aries P. L'Homme devant la mort. Moscow. Pp.. 5–32.
Lyubimovich, M. (2014) Depths of kinship. Kino art. Vol. 9. (In Russian).
Moiseyev, V. N. (2016) To the Statement of the Problem of Mortality in the Age of New Media. Observatory of Culture. Vol. 13(3). Pp. 274-279. (In Russian).
Salgado, S. (2015) The salt of the Earth. Transl. into Russian. Moscow.
Simonov, K. M. (1999) A Hundred Days of War. Smolensk. (In Russian).
Sischy, I. (1991) Good Intentions. The New Yorker. 9 September.
Sontag, S. (2014) Regarding the Pain of Others. Transl. into Russian. Moscow.
Soviet Photography. (1999). Vol. 1. Moscow. (In Russian).
Weber, T. (2014) Representations of Corpses in Contemporary Television. The Social Construction of Death. Interdisciplinary Perspectives. Ed. by L. Van Brussel and N. Carpentier. NY.
( 319.94 kB ) 
( 313.18 kB )
Issue: 2, 2020
Series of issue: Issue 2
Rubric: ARTICLES
Pages: 74 — 90
Downloads: 839