Good, Jennifer (2024) Grieving the ‘poor image’: Screen-mediated loss during Covid-19. In: ICPT2024 Deathscapes: Histories of Photography and Contemporary Photographic Practices, 7-9 November 2024, Nicosia, Cyprus.
Type of Research: | Conference, Symposium or Workshop Item |
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Creators: | Good, Jennifer |
Description: | The Covid-19 pandemic propelled photography into a new relationship with death, under emergency conditions. In the isolation of pandemic lockdowns, digital photography and video provided a lifeline of connection for people everywhere. But for some, these technologies carried a greater burden. Separated at their darkest moments, relying on screens for connection as never before, loss became mediated suddenly by photography in a completely new way. There was no choice but to say goodbye to dying loved ones, isolated in care homes and hospital wards, through Zoom and Facetime,technologies developed by social media corporations for the purposes of business conferencing and ‘chat’ – visual encounters characterised by glitch, imperfection and what Hito Steyerl (2009) has called the ‘poor image’: ‘a lure, a decoy, an index…a reminder of its former visual self.’ What does it mean to say goodbye in this way? To share final words, final gazes, and the last moments of a life – and then to undertake the work of mourning – through a screen? Some of the most influential writing on photography has been about the intimacy of its relationship to death. But is this literature capable of accounting for this new kind of loss? Using interviews with bereaved people and healthcare workers tasked with facilitating virtual ‘goodbyes’, this paper considers the ways in which the pandemic has taken established thought regarding not only death and photography, but also the temporality of cyberspace and the digital image, and turned it on its head. |
Official Website: | https://www.photographyandtheory.com/icpt2024 |
Keywords/subjects not otherwise listed: | psychology, trauma, death, social media, Covid-19, digital communication |
Your affiliations with UAL: | Colleges > London College of Communication |
Date: | 8 November 2024 |
Event Location: | Nicosia, Cyprus |
Date Deposited: | 13 Jan 2025 14:18 |
Last Modified: | 13 Jan 2025 14:18 |
Item ID: | 23233 |
URI: | https://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/id/eprint/23233 |
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