On Mourning, Making, Circulating: Refusing the 'Posthumous Humiliation' of Susan Sontag

Abstract

<p>The ‘loquacious presence' of a loved one’s death can demand a productive response. For artists working with literary and visual mediums, the affect of private grief is often channeled into a memorialisation project where a tangible artefact is constructed, and ultimately then made public.</p> <p>When noted intellectual Susan Sontag died from cancer, her ‘close friend’ Annie Leibovitz worked through her mourning process via the production, circulation (and commodification) of carefully selected images in <em>A Photographer’s Life: 1990-2005</em>. The book’s sweep of photographs—from an eclectic lens that documents and mediates the pathos of familial of bonds; traversed geographies of global landmarks, and signature poses of the famous—dialogically, insistently and inevitably (re) arrange themselves around the haunting spectre of Sontag’s illness and death.</p> <p>Leibovitz’s imbricating desire is for a viewer to participate in a shared testimonial enterprise of mourning Sontag’s palliative decline and abject body in extremis by gazing at her photographic record. This paper offers a personal meditation— an explanation (perhaps expiation)— on my respectful refusal to perform the ethically compromised role of Sontag’s reciprocal witness.</p>