When confronted with scenes of death, television newscasters sometimes resort to the oxymoron: "Too graphic to show." Popular media lack a sense, once conveyed in Christian art, that the dead have something to say to the living. The words memento mori "remember your mortality" were in the past frequently attributed to skeletons. Although this was meant as an admonition against sin, images of the dead need no religious framework to convey moral meaning. Photojournalism, with its moral ambitions, has never acquiesced in the occultation of death.
World Press Photo, a Netherlands-based non-profit organisation dedicated to the advancement of the medium, awards yearly prizes in nine categories: people in the news, general news, spot news, contemporary issues, daily life, portraits, arts and entertainment, nature, and sports with each divided into "singles" and "stories". Despite the inclusion of some soft subjects, the foundation's annual catalogues are consistently memorable for the encounters they facilitate with death and violence. While their presentation of mortality is secular, they retain the power to make icons and martyrs.
The most unlikely martyr of 2011 was Muammar Gaddafi, whose lynching in Sirte last October proved that a dictator's best revenge is to die badly. He has been afforded two deaths by this year's jury: a portrait by the late Rémi Ochlik (first prize general news, stories), shows him lying on a mattress in a cold storage room in Misrata, surrounded by the feet of macabre pilgrims, while a bloody still from a mobile phone video taken of his death receives "special mention". To the viewer falls the moral work: a powerful memento mori from one tyrant to others vies with the cheap pity a murdered tyrant evokes.
Into the column of icons falls this year's overall winner, Samuel Aranda's shot of a Yemeni mother in a niqab cradling her son, who did not actually die, but fell into a coma after being gassed during a demonstration against Ali Abdullah Saleh in Sana'a. Out of an impressive array of "Arab spring" images, this notionally representative photo is an odd choice, both because it implies an awkward metaphor (the jury chair, Getty Images vice-president Aidan Sullivan, notes its clear likeness to Christian images of Mary cradling a dead Jesus), and because it casts the uprisings in a needlessly kitschy and death-like aspect. It may be hoped that the jury's choice suggests more about the ongoing friction between aesthetic and subject in the medium than it does about the hopes of the Arab sphere.
Because the afflicted cannot project their own meaning, photojournalists often meet accusations that their motives are morbid rather than moral. Li Yang's image of a Chinese woman throwing herself from a seventh-floor window on her wedding day (third prize spot news, singles) is a good example of the type of image that raises dilemmas. It seems cruel and exploitative, and well beyond a "public interest" defence. Yet curiously, it is one of two Chinese suicide attempts included this year (the other is by Shaofeng Xu, honourable mention, contemporary issues, singles). Ethical queries may give way to the question of what Chinese photographers intend by documenting them. Could suicide portraits be a genre of protest?
Potent meaning may be ascribed to the dead throughout the 2012 collection. Niclas Hammarström's awful, eerie images from Utøya (second prize stories, spot news) coolly deflate Anders Breivik's romantic delusion. Ebrahim Noroozi's series on public hanging in Iran (second prize stories, contemporary issues) conveys the menace implied in a theocratic state's harnessing of the memento mori. Pedro Pardo's image (third prize stories, contemporary issues) of mutilated body parts arranged on a street in Acapulco reminds viewers that, since even yesterday's holiday spot can turn into today's charnel house, no vacation from images of death is long possible or, moreover, responsible.
