Blogs

"Sleeping beauty"

When I am dead and in my grave
And all my bones are rotten.
When this you see remember me Lest I should be forgotten.”

This is the first posting on Art Blart on the phenomenon of postmortem photography for exhibitions on this subject are few and far between.

Any photograph is a “little death” which “refers to the concept of “la petite mort” or “the little death,” a French idiom and euphemism for the momentary loss of consciousness or breath, often associated with orgasm, but also used to describe the act of freezing a moment in time through photography. This concept suggests that photography, by capturing a specific moment, essentially stops time and thus, in a way, creates a small, contained death of that moment.” (Google AI Overview)

All photographs (and especially postmortem photography where the deceased are memorialised through images) can be seen as “memento mori”, a Latin phrase meaning “remember you must die,” reminding us that of the impermanence of life – for photographs “capture a moment in time, forever preserving a fleeting instant and highlighting the passage of time and the inevitability of death.” (Google AI Overview)

As Susan Sontag observed, “All photographs are memento mori. To take a photograph is to participate in another person’s (or thing’s) mortality, vulnerability, mutability.” (On Photography)

Victorians were faced with the vicissitudes of fortune, and death at any age was a common occurrence due to illness with no antibiotics available to treat the many lethal diseases. They became stoic in the face of the impermanence of life, stoic in the face of death and through photography, sought to record into permanence the likenesses of the departed (the beloved), so that they could remember and honour them. Photographs thus became symbols of mortality which encouraged reflection on the meaning and fleetingness of life…

But unlike a photographic self-portrait, where a human looks at their image (in which they are dead) which reminds them about their physical death in the future, an anterior future of which death is the stake (and the prick of discovery of this equivalence)1 - in postmortem photography the little death and the actual death are as one for the anterior future can never be viewed by the subject of the photograph (they are dead), a separation only revived in the heart and mind of another.

Through postmortem photography the deceased live in an interstitial space, forever brought back to life in the eyes of the viewer as we reawaken and reactivate their spirit in the world. I was once here and I am again. Remember me.

Thus the euphemism “sleeping” is appropriate (sleeping beauty awakened once more with a kiss), as the viewer transcends time bringing past dead back into living world – where past, present and future coalesce into single point in time – their death and our death connected through the gaze and the knowledge of our discontinuity. Eons contracted into an eternal moment.2

In this expanded-specific moment in time, through an awareness of our own dis/continuity, what we are doing is talking about something that is remarkable. We are moving towards a language that defines the human condition…

Dr Marcus Bunyan

‘Remember Me. Postmortems from the M. G. Jacob Collection’ and
‘Through Light. The First 20 Years of Photography in the Photo Library Collections’ at Biblioteca Panizzi, Reggio Emilia, Italy

24th April – 5th July, 2025

SEE THE FULL POSTING AT https://wp.me/pn2J2-v6N

1/ Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (La Chambre claire), Section 39, 1980
2/ Marcus Bunyan. "This is not my favourite photograph," part of What makes a great photograph? at the Centre for Contemporary Photography (CCP), Fitzroy, Wednesday 5th December 2012 [Online] Cited 27/06/2025

Many thankx to the Biblioteca Panizzi and Michael G. Jacob for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.

Main image:

Unknown photographer (American)
A sleeping man (detail)
c. 1846
Daguerreotype
Title given by the collector

Unknown photographer (American)
A sleeping girl
c. 1846
Daguerreotype
Title given by the collector

It seems that the camera my grandfather gave to me only a few month ago is about to mean more to me than a camera ever should. It is a second model Leica and it used to belong to my great grandfather, Alexander Wienerberger.  The photographs he took on this camera were not only published but are said to be the only verified images to come out of Ukraine during the man-made famine of 1932-33, named Holodomor and reported as killing up to 10 million people.

Now this is of great interest to me as I am about to go into my final year of my Fine Art Photography Degree.  Normally this is not my area, I lean more towards the experimental and scientific but I cannot let this amazing opportunity pass me by.  This means starting my research from scratch, so I will apologise in advance for my initial naivety on the sensitive yet personal subject I am about to embark on.

Something I already know:

1. There was talk on wiki about the copy right to my great grandfathers images, I believe if the author dies before 1955 then the copyright would no longer exist however in true style my great grandfather died 5th Jan 1955, meaning (I think as the law is so hard to decipher) that the copy right is still in place for all of his work.

2. Alexander spent some years as a political prisoner of war and in total spent 19 years in Ukraine, the reason he was not killed was due to his knowledge of explosives but to what extent he helped is unknown at the moment.

3. He published Hart auf Hart in Germany 1939 and had work published in other books around the same period (all work in German unless translated and released later)

This is interesting due to his connection to Germany at this time.

What next?

I am in the process of receiving some of his unpublished work that will need translating from German.  I am in the process of planning a trip to Austria (where he was born and his images are archived in the main library) Germany (where his books and images are archived in the main library.  I will look at getting the camera serviced at by the main Leica office but I imagine this is just a dream that could never happen) and Ukraine (to use his camera once again to document the change over the past 79 years.) This will not be done till the end of the year and has many financial hurdles to overcome.

The final aim is to publish a piece of work that not only highlights Holodomor but expresses who my great grandfather was and how important he was in proving Holodomor actually happened.