Bild und Tod

Is the image strong like death is? Or is it dead, merely a shadow? Is it alive, even transfiguring into eternal life? Or is it neither, undead - or at least possessed of a long afterlife? Is 'death' a dark imaginary, a transcendence producing images; can one ask an image: 'Pray tell me, how do you feel about death?' The contributions collected in both volumes deal with the iconic interferences of image and death in the perspective of cultural and visual anthropology. The focus not so much concerns the pictorial representation of death, but rather death as the 'whence' and the 'against what' of image practices, as a dark imaginary provoking images: death as rupture or pathos of image, as defiguration and fundamental split whose traces appear in images. Images are scarred by death. How does the image relate to death, how does death relate to the image - and how does the beholder relate to both? Is the image a horror like death - or resurrection towards the image of eternal life? Practices and concepts of images can be localized and defined more closely between these poles.