Domesticate death. Photography, death and religious worship in installation Monuments, Lecons de tenebres of Christian Boltanski

The article studies Christian Boltanski's Monuments, Legons de tenebres, an installation realized by the artist in 1986 at the Saint-Louis chapel of the Salpetriere hospital, Paris. Establishing a close relationship between death, photography, and religion, the installation is an example for the growing interest in the "attitude toward death" (Philippe Aries), widely discussed since the 1970s in various disciplines and domains such as photography theory, art, philosophy, anthropology, and public media. Conceived by the artist as an attempt to "domesticate death", Monuments, Legons de tenebres develops numerous links to these debates, and confronts them to various religious practices and displays. The result is an allegorical work, a fiction or super-illusion, that superposes different cultural, social, and religious layers in order to explore the incomprehensible and impenetrable nature of death.