Postmortem photography research

Dear reader--

We meet again...

I was thinking the other day about how I blog, this is my blog, yet I don't really read other peoples blogs. So why do you read this? Do you find what I say interesting? Or are you bored and you've just now come across this delightful Internet campground full of rants, random essays, poetry here and there, and every now and then, a cute photograph of my pet(s)?

Anyways, this is usually where I inquire to whether or not you'd like to know what I've been up to. Interested? If you are, keep reading--if not, skip to the next blog because this is a focused post (not allowing myself to ramble on, oops, I'm on a tangent)--so I've previously mentioned I've been writing a research paper on postmortem photography: art versus reality. I did a very very very small study in-class on the response towards postmortem images (Image 1 was a Victorian postmortem image, Image 2 was Margaret Bourke-White's photograph of a South Korean holding the severed head of the North Korean (1952), Image 3 was Ambulance Disaster from Andy Warhol's 1963 Death and Disaster series). The results were, lets just say, astounding. My plan was to categorize the responses as emotional or intellectual, but I needed a consistent method to measure each response. So I thought, and I played around with how to decipher the responses, and I thought some more and then the light bulb…I analyzed each response based on whether or not the response consisted of nouns and adjectives! Nouns are concrete: people, places, things. Adjectives are descriptors. Ergo, nouns correlate to intellectual responses and adjectives correspond to emotional responses.

My preliminary research, in which four of my Google+ followers were kind enough to participate, showed that there were two types of responses according to my method; a mixed response (the response had attributes of both an emotional response and an intellectual response) and a purely intellectual response. The results from the in-class study show that these two response types exist. To cut to the point, not one respondent in either study responded to either the concept of postmortem photography or the visual stimuli purely emotionally. My hypothesis was that people respond toward reality-based and artistic postmortem images differently and in fact, this is true. In Study 2 (in-class study), every respondent viewed Image 3 (Warhol's work) completely intellectually. My reasoning for this is because art is representational, the death in the artistic image is representational--this causes a detachment between the viewer and the piece and the response reflects this detachment. My reasoning for my people only have an emotional response in conjunction with that of an intellectual is precisely because the subject matter makes people uncomfortable (it could potentially be too upsetting to allow oneself to respond fully emotionally). This could be related to subconscious versus conscious and the filter…anyhow, that's a separate topic of study.

Fascinating huh? I think so.