THE DEATH SELFIE
Siavash Shirzade, 38 years old
His last selfie shows him masked against tear gas.
Ahmad Ashiri, 34 years old
His last selfie shows him crying blood before his death.
“Affective witnessing” is an embodied form of witnessing (Richardson and Schankweiler 237), interlinked with media depictions of “violent attacks or human rights violations” (238). The death selfie is a powerful example of a media form that necessitates the practice of affective witnessing. The “death selfie” refers to “selfies unknowingly taken before death, selfies of death where the taker’s death is almost witnessed [,] and selfies with death where the taker stands by while someone else dies” (Hjorth and Cumiskey 168). The last selfies of Siavash Shirzade and Ahmad Ashiri are both selfies before death and of death, as they both died shortly after taking these photos. Politically-charged death selfies are powerful because, as Richardson and Schankweiler state, “‘history and memory, too, become accessible through the body rather than through written records’” (245). The physical gesture of selfie-taking, as explained by Frosh, further invites viewers to participate in affective witnessing (Frosh 1623). As a result, participating in the affective witnessing of death selfies renders the image a site of resistance against cultural and political erasure.
