Dead things we find

We live in a culture where death is denied and washed away from daily life.

To be interested in death is considered morbid or taboo, and most often work concerning it is prefaced as scientific, reveres it as sacred and incomprehensible, or is forewarned as gruesome. Outside of these contexts, however, there is no acceptable place for viewing death. Dead animals are a particularly special case for us, as animals exist primarily as reflections of ourselves. In western, industrialized societies, animals have become marginalized from their own histories, and in turn so have we: we cannot understand their actual existence, nor their death.

Although they possess comparable internal anatomies, the sight of a dead animal does not elicit the same unease as does a dead human. When we find a dead animal in the course of our daily life and travel – one that is not contextualized/commodified by a glass case or a laboratory manual – the experience is uncomfortable, but not emotional. We expect dead animals to disappear for us completely, much in the way we do trash on the side of the road.

A found dead animal is one of the few examples of an animal that is not commodified: it is simply a creature whose natural life has come to an end in an environment inhabited by people. Perhaps some of our discomfort stems from the subtle reminder that we can never truly posses and contain the spaces in which we live.

Dead Things We Find is a collection of images of found dead animals and a visual investigation of death's place in daily life.

I invite you to stop the next time you pass by a dead animal and to submit its image to this collection.

Artists may retain their copyrights for images published on DTWF. Permission of the artist must be obtained for reproduction of these images. All other images are copyrighted by Dead Things We Find.

I will consider any reasonable request for an image to be removed from this site.

DTWF does not support the purposeful killing/attempted killing of animals (unless you're going to eat them), or general misdeeds toward animals.