Morbid voyeurism | Daniel Xerri

Recently I observed a group of elderly men at a café looking at the photo of a woman’s face shorn off by a shotgun. They passed the phone around and gawped at the image. They seemed blind to the fact that before her life was taken from her, that woman was someone loved by her children and relatives, a human being worthy of respect even in death.

One of the worse violations of a person’s dignity is probably that of gaping at their mangled corpse after they have been killed in a horrific accident or grisly murder. The act of covering a blood splattered corpse soon after death is meant to prevent our eyes from examining the remains of what once was an intact and valuable individual. It preserves the honour that every human life is entitled to, even when lost.

The ubiquity of smartphones has given casual bystanders the ability to capture the immediate moments after someone’s tragic end. In many cases, there is ample time to do so before the emergency services and law enforcement are on the scene. This puts the bystander in the position of having to decide whether to perpetuate their intrusive stares by snapping a photo or else shield the corpse from the morbid voyeurism of their peers.

When bystanders choose to take a photo of what is probably the victim’s most vulnerable moment, they are making a conscious decision to souvenir an event that – while out of the ordinary – does not really concern them nor deserve to be documented by them. They are trampling over the victim’s dignity by giving themselves the means to gawk at the gruesome scene whenever they wish to do so.

Social networking sites and messaging apps have helped nurture many people’s penchant for sharing photos that record their daily experiences – whether ordinary or not. Those bystanders who use their phone to create a memento of what they witnessed at a tragic event, soon after have to decide whether to share the photo of the victim’s body or not.

While a fascination with death and its physical manifestations has long existed within different human cultures and is even celebrated in art and cinema, this does not excuse anyone armed with a smartphone from respecting the dignity of those who lose their lives in tragic circumstances.

Observing those men studying the snapshot taken soon after a horrific femicide reminded me of those other instances when I had heard of photos of dead bodies making the rounds, a woman blown up by a bomb and a biker crushed by a truck. It made me think of the people I love and of how I would feel if their death were to be documented and shared on strangers’ phones just because of someone’s decision to give in to voyeuristic tendencies rather than exercise empathy and show respect toward others.