The Last Image: Photography and Death

by Georges Didi-Huberman (Contributor), Christoph Ribbat (Contributor), Hartmut Böhme (Contributor)

Published on the occasion of an exhibition at C/O Berlin, The Last Image collects works that reveal the particularly powerful relation between photography and death. Photographic images, as the book’s editors put it, can be seen as “averting” death through capturing and recording life, but they also can serve as a potent reckoning with death in their direct relation with the human body as object. With both well-known and overlooked works by artists including Larry Clark, Nan Goldin, Thomas Hirschhorn, Peter Hujar, Bertolt Brecht, Gerhard Richter, Weegee and Duane Michals, the catalogue collects over 300 photographs ranging from the 19th century to the present, along with texts by curators, scholars and theoreticians such as Georges Didi-Huberman, Florian Ebner, Peter Geimer, Thomas Macho and Katharina Sykora. Many of the images present are by non-artists, including scientific, personal and journalistic photography.

320 pages, Hardcover

Published May 21, 2019

About the author

Georges Didi-Huberman, a philosopher and art historian based in Paris, teaches at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. Recipient of the 2015 Adorno Prize, he is the author of more than fifty books on the history and theory of images, including Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the Photographic Iconography of the Salpêtrière (MIT Press), Bark (MIT Press), Images in Spite of All: Four Photographs from Auschwitz, and The Surviving Image: Phantoms of Time and Time of Phantoms: Aby Warburg's History of Art.

Reviews

[Melissa Dally · Rating 4 out of 5]

This one is interesting and tricky to rate. It winds up feeling like a stream of consciousness collection of death-related images with the occasional random picture thrown in. Interspersed throughout are quarter-width pages on a much thinner paper with a scholarly essay. This could absolutely be a 5 star book if there weren't so many pages of blurry images with no explanation.