The Obscene Mystery.

If death is the Obscene Mystery, how do we manage our memories of our deceased? Qua Sontag, photographs of memorials function as a metonymic index for the deceased, helping us to negotiate the tension between their continued social presence and the stark, irrevocable fact of their physical absence. "For those who live neither with religious consolations about death nor with a sense of death .... death is the obscene mystery, the ultimate affront, the thing that cannot be controlled. It can only be denied.” By photographing these localities can we, as Sontag suggested, symbolically possess them, or will they always remain tantilisingly out of reach,The Obscene Mystery? Hidegger has it that death is a solo event, something one can only do by oneself, yet by photographing the End, do we, can we, turn it a collective experience If death is the Obscene Mystery, how do we manage memories of our deceased? Through photographing physical memorials, they function as a metonymic index for the deceased, betokening both their continued social presence yet simultaneously underlining the fact of their physical absence. Can we, as Susan Sontag suggested, symbolically possess them, or will they always remain tantalisingly out of reach, The Obscene Mystery?