The most beautiful suicide: when mortality meets photography
In the conjunction of mortality and beauty in photography, the dignity of the person is not always guaranteed.
“The death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world” (Poe, 1846: 19; quoted in Bronfen, 1992: 59)
The American writer Edgar Allan Poe stated these words in 1846 in his Philosophy of Composition. Almost a century later, on May 1947, Life magazine published The most beautiful suicide, a picture taken by student photographer Robert Wiles that immortalizes the dead body of Evelyn McHale, an American girl who jumped from the Empire State Building eleven days before publication.
In The most beautiful suicide, the beauty of the subject seems to be emphasized over the tragedy of death. It is an example of a case where the boundary between photography made to document and photography aimed to please has not been clearly defined. Above all, it is a picture of a deceased person, whose last will, as reported on her suicide note, happened to be of an ironic sort: “I don’t want anyone in or out of my family to see any part of me. Could you destroy my body by cremation?” (The Times Record, 1947: 1,17; quoted in Evelyn McHale, 2015).
In this essay, I will endeavor to explain the reason why the visual representations of femininity and death seem to imply aesthetic pleasure, investigating the influence of the social context. Subsequently, I will illustrate the risks resulting from the conjunction of mortality and beauty in photography, when the dignity of the person is not always guaranteed.
In the picture of R. Wiles, the woman appears supine on the top of the car, among twisted steel deformed by her crush. The position of the body gives the idea of a person who is resting. The gently crossed legs and the gloved hand clutching her necklace, embrace the impression of quietness that connote her image, enforced by the peaceful expression on her face.
The fashionable and accurate clothes style of the woman is indicative of the epoch in which the incident occurred. The photographer caught the picture from a frontal perspective, which emphasizes the shape of her body. Faces from the crowd emerge in the background.
Robert Wiles captured The most beautiful suicide in the instant preceding the disintegration of the body while it was still intact in its beauty. At that moment, in fact, the decomposition process resulting from death had not started yet; therefore, the latter appears as a perfect form of an unanimated figure. The aesthetic pleasure derived from the beauty of the body is increased by the viewer’s implicit awareness that the form they are looking at is still intact and about to decompose.
Consequently, the picture is fascinating because it unconsciously invalidates the principle of disintegration and vulnerability, which we tend to reject, despite being typical of human existence. According to Elisabeth Bronfen (1992), we are captivated by the image of a dead body because being projected in another dimension, we experience the event indirectly.
Moreover, despite the fact that we are forced to confront ourselves with the presence of death in life, at the same time the representation of someone else’s death confirms our own immortality: “there is death, but it is not my own” (Bronfen, 1992: x)
Since the visual representations of death are influenced by a common cultural context, investigating the historical circumstances in which The most beautiful suicide occurs can be useful to understand the reason why it became an iconic image. The death of Evelyne McHale arose in the period just after World War II, when America was experiencing a moment of instability that affected society on all levels, including the culture and the conception of women, who had acquired more independence during the war.
The post-war period saw the attempt of society to reintroduce those feminine ideals of the woman who works at home looking after the family. To facilitate this conversion, forms of mass media contributed to introducing a new ideal of the perfect feminine figure. After 1940, American journalism saw the introduction of picture-based magazines like Life and Look, which were consumed especially by the growing middle class.
Despite the multitude of body types disseminated by the media, it was possible to delineate a profile of the ideal American lady: a thin, tall, and busty woman, who wears cutaway suits and Chanel gloves. Above all, a female with blonde hair and white skin, such as Evelyn McHale, embodies that ideal of beauty spread across post-war America.
It is perhaps its cultural context and aesthetics that inspired artists Andy Warhol and Matthew Barney to appropriate The most beautiful suicide and create the Suicide (Fallen Body) serigraph (1962) and the Drawing Restraint 17 (2010), respectively. The appropriation of a photograph to create a body of art is frequent in Western culture. However, considering that the picture of Wiles, beyond the aesthetic composition and subject, documents the suicide of a person makes us reflect on the moral value of the photograph.
A debate on the ethic of representation brings us back to 1836 when in New York the Herald published a lithograph made by Henry Robinson that erotized Ellen Jewett, a 23 years old courtesan who was murdered a few days before by a man called Richard Robinson. Designed as a calculated strategy to increase sales, the publication of the print received the criticism of The New York Sun (1836: 1), which acclaimed:
It is sufficiently indecent to render it attractive to persons of depraved tastes, […] those who have seen her said that Henry Robinson has murdered her far more barbarously than Richard Robinson did. (1836: 1, quoted in Leja, 2015: 149).
The outrage committed on the body of Ellen Jewett can equally be identified with the case of Evelyn McHale. In fact, her picture has been published by Life with a caption that, similarly to the one in the Herald, minimizes the tragedy of the death of the girl, who “reposes calmly in grotesque bier” (Life, 1947: 1, quoted in Evelyn McHale, 2015), as Ellen Jewett “[is] reposing in the embrace of death” (New York Herald, 1836: 1, quoted in Leja, 2015: 149).
In conclusion, Evelyn McHale can be seen in the same way as a victim of a marketing operation, which took advantage of the aesthetic pleasure conveyed by the photograph of Wiles to increase sales. This is a circumstance still encountered nowadays, which originates from the fact that news is, today as in the past, a commercial as well as a social product.
Therefore, the contemporary debate on the ethics of representation seems to affirm that there is still the need to formulate a regulatory code able to guarantee the dignity of the person in any circumstance.
Reference List
Bronfen E. (1992) Over her dead body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic, Manchester University Press
Evelyn McHale (2015) Available at: http://www.codex99.com/photography/43.html (Accessed: 15/11/2016)
Leja, M. (2015) News Pictures in the Early Years of Mass Visual Culture in New York: Lithographs and Penny Press, in Getting the picture: The visual culture of the news, Hill J.E. and Schwartz V. R. (2015), Bloomsbury Academic, p. 146–153
Matelski E. M. (2011) The Color(s) of Perfection: The Feminine Body, Beauty Ideals, and Identity in Postwar America, 1945–1970 in Dissertation, Loyola University Chicago, p.158. Available at: http://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/158 (Accessed: 18/11/2016)