DEATH – FROM TABOO TO POPULAR CULTURE

Text topic: Studies

Text author: Александрија Ајдуковић

From Roger Fenton’s 15-second exposure to Instagram. The first war photographer took pictures of soldiers chatting at ease around trenches but avoided photographing death scenes. He wanted to show a less gruesome side of war. The famous Valley of the Shadow of Death, a photograph Fenton took during the Crimean War, represents more than an objective documentarist approach. There is no explicit death on this photograph, but it is in a way a portrait of death without the dead. Today, with Instagam app, we can upload death scenes to the web instantaneously, at the moment of exposure. The photographs of death we took in passing along the local road will immediately be uploaded to our FB profiles, Twitter, Foursquare, Tumblr, Flickr and Posterous. Hybrid forms of photo apps and social networks have made death scenes even less of a taboo by making them commonplace – a trend which had already started with the advent of digital photography. The first major change was introduction of a rolled photographic film by Kodak (“You press the button, we do the rest”). The phenomena which shed more light on the process of de-tabooing death and creating a phenomenon of popular culture include WEEGEE and other art photographers who build on their tradition.