(wl 2177)-Photographs of Dead Bears Witness to Unvarnished Reality of Political Malice

The critical vocabulary of the discipline of photography – the illustrative labyrinth of memento-mori – only began being applied to photographs of the dead with the onset of photography being deployed to record a series of genocides in the twentieth century. These photographs heralded a departure from the hitherto limited use of the photograph of the dead either as forensic evidence or as part of the private family archive, transforming the role of photography, making it a way to acknowledge and memorialise the death of the citizen. When India was hit by the second wave of the COVID pandemic crisis in the months of April–June 2021 last year, a spate of images of funeral pyres and graves circulated widely on social media to underline how the healthcare system had crumbled and how citizens were left to bear the brunt of the situation. The article gives a historical context of the similar situation during the colonial times in India when its regions were hit by famine (1943-1945). The article aims to see the collective rendezvous between the photographer, the participant-subject and viewer that reinstates the grounds of civil existence between the three. The field of vision of the photograph leads the viewers to activate the sense of solidarity with the dead neither produced incidentally or accidentally, but frozen in the moment of the photograph.