Subject and object in Pieter Hugo’s The Bereaved.

This paper focuses on the aesthetics of the fine art, photographic representation of the dead body in Pieter Hugo’s photographic series,The Bereaved, produced in 2005. The series consists of four close-up colour photographs of the faces of men who died of AIDS-related illnesses and were photographed in their caskets, in an informal morgue in Khayelitsha, Cape Town, South Africa. Katarzyna Majak’s theory of socialisation as an attempt to lessen the scandal of the corpse through representation is central as an analytical tool throughout this paper. Majak argues that for the viewer the corpse is a scandal, because it discomfortingly presents the transformation of a body from subject to object. For Majak, socialisation is essentially the taming of the dead body, achieved by re-presenting the corpse as an individual. This paper expands on Majak’s valuable theory by arguing that socialisation is a continuum between emphasising the subject-ness of the deceased individual, rather than the object-ness of the corpse as matter. Importantly, this continuum reveals varying degrees of socialisation within Hugo’s series, and other fine art examples discussed. Socialisation offers an alternative reading of the series concerned with the absence of the subject created by death and representation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]