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Popular Culture Review
taken to elevate her career and star status while allowing spectators, in the words
of Metz, to “fetishize” Dandridge (85-6).
If this photograph is symbolic of Dandridge’s death, a review of the
relationship that co-exists between photography and death as articulated by Metz
seems called for. It should be noted that in this reading of the photograph my
understanding is either greatly enhanced or diminished by superimposing a
theoretical paradigm that has grown out of colonial discourse. Metz postulated
that photography was closely related to death because: (a) they share immobility
and silence; (b) photography evokes memories of those victimized by death; (c) a
photograph “is the instantaneous abduction of the object out of the world into
another world, into another kind of time’’; and (d) a photograph maintains the
memory of the dead as being dead (83-4). Metz further contends that a photograph
parallels death in t hat it is immediate and definitive, thus, with respect to Dandridge’s
photo, Dandridge is captured in a single and definitive moment of time that can
never be recaptured or reclaimed (84). In the aftermath of her death, it is only
through such photos that we will ever know Dandridge, an African American
woman, and an African American star. Metz similarly argues that photography is a
mirror of the aging process of an individual because of the photo’s ability to capture
a single moment in time (84). For Dandridge, the photograph crystallizes her in
time, thus, forcing us to reflect on what occurred both before and after this moment.
And because the photo is a still, Dandridge is frozen in time, as our memory is
jolted into recall for the before and the after of that moment.
Roland Barthes similarly connected death with photography and argued
that “the reading of [a] photograph is thus always historical; it depends on the
reader’s knowledge just as though it were a matter of a real language, intelligible
only if one has learned the signs” (28). Barthes at the same time commented on the
paradox of reading a photograph based on its denotative and connotative message
thus usurping the issue of “how then can the photograph be at once ‘objective’ and
‘invested,’ natural and cultural?” (20). With respect to Dandridge’s death,
Dandridge’s photo becomes emblematic of death; were it not for her death, this
photograph would have no lasting value.
Adding to this discussion, Walter Benjamin points to the fact that:
No matter how artful the photographer, no matter how carefully
posed his subject, the beholder feels an irresistible urge to search
such a picture for the tiny spark of contingency, of the Here and
Now, with which reality has so to speak seared the subject, to
find the inconspicuous spot where in the immediacy of the longforgotten moment the future subsists so eloquently that we,
looking back, may rediscover it (243).