Memories of Futures: The Temporalities of Organ Transplantation

This photographic essay explores experiential meanings of haunting in deceased organ transplantation. Where life is often figured as presence and death as absence, this piece delves into how one may be both dead and alive, present and absent. In so doing, it creates space for how death may be vitality and how afterlives continue in the form of collective being. The photographic essay, as a genre, is examined as a turning towards the more-than-one in the self and death as constitutive of life. Photography becomes one way to foreground haunting as both material presence and visual absence. In turn, double exposure opens up the possibility of deceased donor presence and absence in the form of disappearing bodies, body doublings, two beings in and of the self, and ecologies in and of bodies. Haunting – through the technique of double exposure and this uncertain meeting of language and images – creates the possibility of giving visual presence to the dead in the self, to deceased organ donors in transplanted bodies. In so doing, the essay suggests that haunting is integral to the experience of transplantation, to transplant temporalities, where pasts are unknowable and lived, and futures are simultaneously foreclosed and yet to be realized.