Item — HN Reader

I think there's definitely something uncanny about being able to look a dead person in the eyes. It's not so much the recognition that everyone will die as the ability to simultaneously see them as a living being and know them to be gone. Granted, it's debatable whether photographs actually do anything new in that regard. I get the same uncanny feeling when I look in the eyes of the Hellenistic Egyptian mummy paintings:

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Fayum_mummy_portr...

2 comments

Maybe photographs don't do anything new but the fact that they are more realistic helps makes it easier to get that feeling, maybe?

I think that's right. Part of why the Fayum mummies are so startling (to me at least) is that they aren't as damaged as other ancient art. Many Greek bronzes originally featured inlaid mother of pearl or jewel irises, for instance, and I like to think of the loss of their eyes as a metaphor for the distance creating by time. With photos that distance is reduced because they're so easy to duplicate that the images they encode can never really be damaged, in a way. At least not in the way that things like Greek bronzes can.

> I think there's definitely something uncanny about being able to look a dead person in the eyes.

Not really. It's also not like looking at a photograph.