...the photograph is a space of the return of the dead. In this haunted theatre, the spectre appears: The first actors separated themselves from the community...make oneself up was to designate oneself as a body both living and dead .... Now it is the same relation which I find in the Photograph: however lifelike...

...with death through theater, through the cultof the dead. "To make oneself up," Barthes writes, "is to designate oneself as a body simultaneously living...totemic theater, the man with the painted face in Chinese theater, the rice-paste makeup of the Indian KathaKali, the Japanese No mask."78 Barthes, waxing...

...intermediary' of death; insofar as Barthes claims 'the original relation of the theater and the cult of the Dead' ('to make oneself up was to designate...oneself as a body simultaneously living and dead'), so 'Photography is a kind of primitive theater, a kind of Tableau Vivant, a figuration of the motionless...