The Afterlife of the Photographic subject in the photographs of Nan Goldin and Julia Margaret Camero

Assaf examines photographs of the departed with reference to the concept of the Sasa and Zamani and revisits the works of the artists Nan Goldin and Julia Margaret Cameron.  In the late 1970s, Goldin began taking photographs of her friends, some of whom were terminally–ill, with the aim of keeping these Sasa alive in memory. Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron had a similar idea close to a century earlier. In the 1860s, Cameron photographed her circle of friends to ‘provide her subjects with an afterlife’, with the aim of creating a ‘pantheon of immortal heads’.  As such, she unwittingly created a gallery of Zamani, revered ancestors who no longer exist in living memory. Goldin and Cameron’s subjects have physically departed, but they are at different stages of death in the silent theatre of photography. Assaf examines how this affects the images themselves and our vision of them.