The Last Image

Living and dying, loving and letting go—images, films, and books about death tap into our deepest fears about the finiteness of existence. Photography is not the first medium to have been used to “avert” death, yet since its invention, no other medium has grappled with the subject in quite the same way, harnessing visual strategies and technologies. Much of this has to do with photography’s unique characteristics: photographs are seen as cutting across both space and time to capture a moment and are also considered to be direct records of reality. The catalogue which accompanies the exhibition presents a survey, unprecedented in its scale and diversity, of over 320 photographic works on death, from the dawn of photography to the present day. The Last Image: Photography and Death, curated by Felix Hoffmann at C/O Berlin, from 8 December 2018 to 3 March 2019.