Photographic, film and video representations of dying and dead subjects bring to light delicate balancing acts of agency involving representational perspective. In this thesis, I examine contemporary, lens-based artworks by Sarah Charlesworth, Eric Fischl (whose sculptural medium is an exception), Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu, Gillian Wearing, Andres Serrano, Nan Goldin, AA Bronson and Jorge Zontal, as well as works by photojournalists Richard Drew and Theresa Frare, to show how they effectively convey facets of identity to dying and dead subjects. The voice, visuality, touch and embodiment (in particular, the body's weight and its materiality) are considered dimensions of intersubjectivity in order to explore how they foster access to the dying or the dead. My hypothesis is that, despite the avenues of intersubjective agency that appear to be foreclosed to the dying and the dead, the artists negotiate the following, significant challenges: how to bear witness to suffering without enacting visual mastery; how to grant a voice to or engage in dialogue with a silenced subject; how to touch the other without inflicting injury. Through the artists' divergent representational paradigms, the terms of intersubjectivity will be shown to equally involve the potential for reverence as well as for representational violence and it is upon this duality that the ethical concern hinges. The degrees of photographic transparency invoked by the artists alter the emergence of identity and the extent to which it reflects the perspective of the dying and the dead or, alternatively, becomes a framework of distortion. In terms of subject matter, the causes of death to the subjects represented, all of which are non-fictional, are AIDS-related illness, falling from buildings and violence (sometimes self-inflicted). Conceptually, I will be relying upon the phenomenological models of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the photographic theories of Roland Barthes, the feminist met

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In this dissertation, I study the corpse as a material in Latin American art at the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st. On the one hand, I show that this is a social analyzer of the terrible consequences of dictatorships, neoliberal policies, and criminal violence on the continent. On the other hand, applying the theory of new materialism and focusing on the presence of the dead body -human or non-human- in the work of artists such as Nicola Costantino, José Antonio Hernández Díez, Teresa Margolles, María Fernanda Cardoso, Arturo Duclos, or Nicolás Lamas, among others, I develop what I call corpse art. As I argue, the impact of this art consists in challenging the limits of the body and its traditional binomials (surface-depth, organic-inorganic, living-dead) using the material capacities of skin, flesh, and bones. The material deployment of the corpse, as well as the re-appropriation of scientific and commercial techniques, put artistic media, their specificities, and their autonomies in crisis. But in addition, this corpse art allows also us to reflect on the manipulation of bodies and power ties that produce objects and merchandise of desire in the Latin American context.