Yes disturbing, beautiful, slightly titilating and exclusive... The photo selections for these pieces always show us that there is a certain kind of grief that we should care for and not other kinds of grief. Yes, I find it manipulative and slightly revolting that this sexualized grief will be the kind of grief we will always choose to display, to direct our empathy, to blind us from the ugly and grotesque representations of grief, that are simply not proper, when we think of death and loss. Caring for only a certain kind of grief and not another kind is always what the sexualization of grief is all about The New York Times will exclude the grotesque from our view but no one seems upset about it.
Go to any great cometary from the period of the late 19th century to today and spend sometime looking at the monuments and you'll see the slightly pornographic display of sexualized grief all over place. The the nude woman folded up on her knees in a posture of deflation (posed for by Isadora Duncan), the nude goddess on the sarcophogas, prostrate nude nymphs to honor the rich and famous, sexualized bas reliefs..... Yes the photographer captured the exact moment of sexualized grief, and intruded ourselves into it with great salaciousness. Perhaps that is what "art" does, but it is certainly propaganda. Where is all the grief that and better than feeling grief we should all feel anger. It has nothing to do with the particular person in the photo, except that she chose to give her name, out of pride and grief... It has everything to do with how we represent grief for patriotic and social purposes. And the fact that we would feel "instant revulsion" at grief represented in perhaps proper Lucian Freud like grotesqueness (or a photographic equivalent) does show that we let ourselves be manipulated by the beauty of these pictures.
In these cases, the cases of grief caused by man folly, and the cases of the representation of grief by big corporations on their front pages, the uglier the better. Fuck beauty!
Jerry
Jerry