Photography: the spark that (re)lights the dead

Abstract

This article investigates how photography functions as a trace of existential reinscription of the dead, including those who were never born, by articulating images, memory, and presence from a transdisciplinary perspective. Drawing on the theoretical contributions of Paul Zumthor and Vinciane Despret, the study proposes that photography is more than a technique of visual recording: it operates as a living cultural enunciation, summoning the dead into the scene of the present. Through a qualitative and theoretical-reflective approach, the text navigates from family photo albums to medical-technical images such as ultrasounds, understood as devices for the anticipation of existence. Photographs, conceived as vehicles of memory, affection, and relational continuity, may function as a form of “biographical supplement”, in the sense proposed by Despret when referring to the mechanisms by which the living continue to write the existence of the dead, resisting their dissolution. The study concludes that narrating the dead — primarily through images, but also through words or gestures — is also an affirmation of the desire to live with them, reinscribing their presence into the sensitive fabric of culture and everyday life.