The techniques of producing death masks and mummies point back to the petrified cadaver as a primordial image. The corpse is a body that turns into a thing and into an image (made) of itself. The essays in this section cluster around this aspect of the dead body's materiality and explore its multifarious afterlives focusing on the entanglement among technical images, natural images and the emerging life sciences of the modern period, from biology to chemistry to geology. Starting with the eighteenth century, modern science was fascinated by the states of life-in-death revealed by ostensibly inert matter, be they fossils, crystals or the natural moulds that grow out of volcanoes. As the movement of life in nature was increasingly recognised to permeate ever deeper time and organic structures, the question arose: is the still, mineralised body actually dead? Or are fossils and stones in states of latent life, suspended animation? And how reversible are these processes of transformation?

The attempt to emulate natural images and processes by chemical and technical means spurred a modern imaginary of living corpses: far from indicating the extinction of the living, petrification seemed to offer a technique for an indefinite extension of life, a living-on that incorporated death in life. Despite the variety of the media involved, this imaginary runs through the photographic plate's capacity to fix and freeze moving beings, the lithic iconography of modern anatomical atlases, the life of organic fossils that survive through material changes, or bodies embalmed as petrified auto-icons. What we see emerging at this historic juncture are the often-unacknowledged forerunners of our contemporary obsession with the animation of things and the deanimation of human bodies. In this light, all the authors here foreground patterns of continuity among the archaic, the modern and the contemporary, and their essays are ultimately also about cultural living corpses, showing how theories that have seemingly expired can take on a new lease of life.

Farinotti's piece begins the section by approaching the ontology of photography from the theoretical standpoint of Blanchot, Barthes and Dubois, whose thanatological perspectives on the medium are woven into a single narrative of the photographic image as ‘death at work’.