This paper examines the photographic postcards of coal mine disasters in early 20^th century Britain in relation to press photography, the postcard’s predecessors such as the stereograph and the carte-de-visite, and the Western visual tradition of Memento Mori, or the commemoration of death. This will help shed light on the dim history of the production and consumption of early photographic postcards and the British working classes. The current issues of death in commercial photography and the “public” and the “private” are discussed.

The postcards from the fire accident at Hamstead Colliery in 1908, which include unique photo-montaged postcards by the photographer, Warner Gothard in Yorkshire, are studied in relation to news photos and local historical records, bringing photographs and factual data from contemporary newspapers and magazines to light.

In addition to the photographic postcard’s functions as news and records, its use for mourning or commemorating the deceased is discussed. Gothard’s framed postcard with debris from the disaster is discussed as a salient example, as is a “memorial” postcard with a killed rescuer’s heroic figure and the victims’ names. The transformation of the photograph from a public to a private medium ―and vice versa, ―through the postcard, is also considered.

All photographs are ruins, and portrait photographs are “corporeal ruins.” While the subject once had a spirit, only a trace exists in its appearance and this is soon lost in the photograph. A series of portrait photographs created as part of a trend in the 1980s could be regarded as one way to deal with photographs being ruins. Their photographers shared “the desire of assimilating to ruins,” and after transfiguring the subject’s body from an organic being to an inorganic substance, they turned it into an image. Hiroshi Sugimoto’s “Portraits” series could be seen as a complete reversal to this trend. Sugimoto tends to tum the vector 180 degrees from death to being and breathes life into a wax figure that does not have a life at all. It attains various characteristics that are usually destroyed when a subject becomes a photograph. The photograph of Sugimoto’s cannot escape being a ruin. However, it is a ruin like “the ruins of Troy” which consist of two or more layers. Continuation of time is regained by piling up various layers of time, and reality is born to the subject of the photograph.

When we consider that the human body connected to visual media feels uncomfortable, what theoretical framework do we have?

The more visual media involve the body, the more they eliminate the body. It is this paradox that Paul Virilio hypothesised, and that I want to examine in this paper. Virilio has continued asserting this paradox since his The Aesthetics of Disappearance. Although this paradox appears clearly in new technology like virtual reality, it is unclear in old optical instruments.

This paper tries to discover this paradox in old optical instruments, drawing extensively on Jonathan Crary’s discussion of optical instruments as an “apparatus.” In doing so, we will prove Virilio’s hypothesis.