Remarks on the Literary Portrait of the Photographer and Death

The article presents various ways in which the character of the photographer has been linked to death in literature. The photographer is often portrayed in literary fiction as the one who witnesses, records, or even causes death. Special attention is given in this chapter to the linguistic analogy between a camera and a gun. Such words as “trigger,” “aim,” and “shoot” are used by Ernest William Hornung, Victor Sawdon Pritchett, Margaret Atwood, and Anthony Horowitz to emphasize the danger of being photographed. I argue that the fictitious photographer plays the role of a trickster-psychopomp, as the click of the camera’s aperture often accompanies a dying person to the outer world. I describe how the photographer is portrayed in literature as the one who gets under the control of his or her apparatus and acts as a functionary of the machine that feeds on human images. The chapter concludes with the topic of death caused by the actions of paparazzo, as is portrayed in works by Leif Davidsen, Allan Russell, and Robert M. Everesz.