Before Mourning: The Broken Time of Disaster Photography

Photography is the medium of mourning par excellence. Barthes devotes Camera Lucida to a photograph of his deceased mother. In Paper Graveyards, Eduardo Cadava analyzes Camera Lucida from the perspective of love. Photography, like a smell or a footprint, operates as a “certificate of presence.” Indexicality is misleading, it plays tricks with time, because photography “enables the close contact between two bodies that inhabit two different spaces and times.” The role that this medium plays in mourning brings to light its time-related capaciousness. For Cadava, photography “condenses, among other things, the relationship between the past and the present, the dead and the living, and destruction and survival.” And yet, in spite of the importance of time in the acts of taking and of seeing a photograph, Greg Battye notes that photography “is a medium of the instant,” an instant that has been “explicitly excised from the flow of time as ordinarily experienced; a medium from which time is apparently absent.” In other words, time defines photography while photography obscures time by freezing duration into an instant and making the instant endure. I discuss photo installations by Gabi Pérez-Silver, Gabriella Báez and Sofía Gallisá that reflect on death and mourning following Hurricane Maria. I discuss the medium’s relationship with memory, the impermanence of things, the decomposition of archives, and particularly its relation to time. I analyze how these artists use the snapshot to mourn preventable deaths and redefine the edges of the now, underlining the continuities among historical, economic, and ecological catastrophes.