Photographing absence in deathscapes

Abstract

How do visual methods, particularly the practice of photography, help us to visualise and understand absence in deathscapes? In this paper I will argue that photographs, with their ability to freeze moments, are able to capture what I term points of praxis – moments in which practices by individuals inscribe meaning onto deathscapes, and in that intense and captured presence, evoke the feeling of absent individuals. Such points of praxis can exist in two ways – the praxis of the body and the praxis of objects – both of which I will illuminate with the use of visual ethnographic methods. To support my argument, I present work taken from a three‐year visual ethnographic study of Bukit Brown Cemetery, specifically drawing on the social and cultural documentation of the Hungry Ghost Festival.