Since reading On Photography and The Image-World, I’ve been reflecting on how photography is used both as an artistic medium and an everyday-necessity for documenting reality. In this text, I found Sontag’s comparison between photographs and death masks to be particularly interesting. Sontag states, “[…] a photograph is not only an image (as a painting is an image), an interpretation of the real; it is also a trace, something directly stenciled off the real, like a footprint or a death mask (Sontag 80). It is rare that in 2018 we think about the ways in which we documented reality before the invention of the camera. Before reading the Sontag text I had never heard of death masks, nor did I think of how people and objects were documented outside the realm of painted portraiture. After doing some research, I am deeply invested in death masks as a form of documentation, and even more interested in the multi-use of sculptural molds as a medium for both documentation and art. Because I was born in the throes of technological advancement, it is difficult to view the death masks as something other than art—a bust— because they are so sculptural and it is difficult to understand life before the camera. These masks make me think of David Wojnarowicz’s photographical “death portraits” of his lover Peter Hujar. Much like a death mask, Wojnarowicz captured, through the medium of photography, the very moment Hujar succumbed to his death. Wojnarowicz’s photo series blurs the lines between photography as art and photography as documentation. This duel-function of photography is something that Sontag grapples with throughout The Image-World but never distinctly differentiates one from the other; photography as art and photography as documentation are intrinsically connected
