This dissertation discusses photographic series by nine contemporary American photographers who picture the materials of death: belongings left behind, physical traces, dead bodies, and cremation ashes. In the series by Andrea Tese, Justin Kimball, and Jonathan Hollingsworth featured in Chapter One, belongings left behind—furniture, clothes, keepsakes, and personal effects—retain physical and psychic traces of the lives of the deceased. The blood- and fluid-stained fabrics and the decaying dead bodies themselves pictured in series by Sarah Sudhoff, Sally Mann, and Robert Shults, discussed in Chapter Two, serve as evidence of the physical and sociopolitical circumstances of death. In Chapter Three, series by Jacqueline Hayden, Jason Lazarus, and David Maisel feature cremation ashes, which suggest, through their resemblance to stars and other sublime vistas, an enduring afterlife.These photographs vacillate between emphasizing the “truth” and persistence of material remains and their literal and metaphorical transformation. Utilizing an array of photographic processes and artistic choices, the photographers lead the viewer through various levels of literal and metaphorical transformation, allowing the photographers to explore new ways to visualize that which otherwise may not be accessible, apparent, or knowable: the story of a life lived and lost, the underlying sociopolitical causes of a death, or the existence of an afterlife. These varied approaches to reading death through transformation suggest possibilities but ultimately accept the limitations of attempting to picture the unknowable. Despite their acknowledgement of such limitations, however, each photographer suggests that efforts to memorialize, understand, and envision remain meaningful and worthwhile.This dissertation primarily utilizes visual analysis and incorporates material from in-depth, firsthand interviews between the author and six of the discussed artists. The dissertation also draws on photography theory and interdisciplinary scholarship from the field of Death Studies. Contemplating the photographs discussed herein, singly and in series, and in conversation with each other and with trends in popular media and contemporary funerary options, allows viewers insight into individual experiences of dying and enables them to extrapolate broader patterns in attitudes, sociopolitical circumstances, and institutions that affect how people age, ail, and die, and mourn and remember today
