related to the other day’s post but. unable to cope with goodsir being established early on as one of the primary documenters of the expedition; we see him manning the camera, examining photographs, recording observations in his notebook, etc… and then the final shot of him after hickey commands him to butcher wilson is this shot that looks almost like a photograph… like. we later come to know that it’s in that moment he is deciding to die, and we can see him in real time going from documenter to document as the life leeches away from him in this scene… from archivist to artifact….
AND how in the scene where we see goodsir taking pictures, it’s sir john that calls for the photo op and it’s he who is immediately killed by the tuunbaq….
to be photographed in the terror means you’re already dead - e.g. the autopsy pictures - or that your death is fast approaching… photograph as grave… camera lens as something which marks people for death… goodsir ushers people into death both in his role as doctor and his role as photographer, ultimately becoming first a photograph and then a corpse which is dissected as he once dissected others…
something something posing for a picture as rehearsal of death
“All those young photographers who are at work in the world, determined upon the capture of actuality, do not know that they are agents of Death.”
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida