The Last Image: Photography and Death

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.