CHALLENGING THE AGENCY OF A CORPSE

2024

Tessa Margolles’s Self-Portrait in the Morgue (1998) and AA Bronson’s Felix, June 5 1994 (1994) are both photographs that contain dead bodies as part of the subject matter of the artworks. While Margolles and Bronson both utilize staged dead bodies in their photographs, the visual elements as well as the ethical questions evoked by the artworks create different overall effects of the two photographs. I will argue that while Bronson’s Felix, June 5 1994 utilizes the visual symbolism of a dead body in a way that serves as a sympathetic tribute to his late lover and honors the dead body as a motif, Margolles’s Self-Portrait in the Morgue is problematic in the way that Margolles takes all agency of the previously-living people for another purpose than honoring the identities of the people themselves. In Bronson’s photograph, his late partner is dressed in one of his own colorful patterned shirts. He is lovingly tucked into bed and propped up by a pillow. His favorite items surround him. The dead body of his late lover is not a prop, but rather the center of this photograph. However, though it is the most important subject matter, it blends into the overall colorful madness of the photograph, blurring the line between the objects from the life he lived and the body he lived in itself. The photograph becomes a celebration of the relics of his life, his former body being one of the relics themselves. In doing so, Bronson gives a new sense of life and agency into the body of his beloved.

This use of a dead body contrasts strongly with that of Margolles’s Self-Portrait in the Morgue. In this photograph, there are two bodies — one living, one dead. Margolles poses with a shrunken dead body in her arms, presenting it to the camera while maintaining eye contact. She doesn’t interact with the body or hold it in a lifelike way, but rather holds it away from her body like an alien specimen. In this photograph, the dead body loses all sense of life and becomes an object in the hands of someone alive. As Andrea Fitzpatrick writes in Reconsidering the Dead in Andres Serrano's The Morgue: Identity, Agency, Subjectivity, “identity involves a quality or comprises a set of qualities, attributes, or characteristics that are considered important in specifying, individuating, and defining the self, and for being recognized in specific ways by others.” In holding the dead body without giving context to who the person was when they were alive, Margolles takes control of what characteristics the person will be remembered by, therefore stealing their identity. In doing so, Margolles puts “the vulnerability of the dead into question.” Without life, we have no agency over our bodies, and it is the choices of the living how to document and express our remains. While Bronson’s depiction of a dead body documents a memory, Margolles’ photograph erases the memory of the former-living person.