Photographs that Move Me

This photograph by Larry Clark moves me in a strange way. It's more about relating to a character that no one relates to - or at least wants to, like the villain in a movie or the pedophile down the street. I feel like this photograph illustrates that the boundaries of good and evil don't actually exist, and we are all filled with both energies - waiting to reveal itself. The leopard print blanket does a great job bringing a sense of immediacy and playfulness to a photograph that pulls at the heart strings of our somewhat terrifying sexual nature.

This photograph is an example of postmortem photography by R.J. Fittell. This photograph moves me, not because it is a photograph of a dead boy, but because of the entirety of it's composition. The candles are placed at his feet, he is raised in the bed with his hands folded in prayer, a cross is located near the mid section of his body and the whole photograph is printed on a post-card type paper. Postmortem photography is such an odd concept- proof that we are never actually photographing some one's essence like we would love to think. The body is an object that will become inanimate. But this raises the question that, alive or dead, doesn't the body become inanimate once we capture it in a photograph? Are they not just living death portraits?

This photograph by Joel-Peter Witkin, shares a very similar concept as postmortem photography. Witkin is extremely successful at what he does, which is photographing those who have been cast out of life (literally and figuratively) : the disfigured, the dwarf, the obese, the hermaphrodite, the decapitated, and the cadaver. This photograph moves me firstly because it is of surrealist magnificence. The cadaver arm and hand draped over a clock with flowers stuffed in the opening of the socket create an image of classical and metaphorical beauty.