As a natural part of life; death and beyond is a phenomenon, in an inseparable part of lifecycle, which human being struggle to find an answer through its existence and never could. As an exact opposite “Being alive”, ironically death concepts reflections can be found in many life practices. In the information obtained from prehistoric human life, the graves and the belongings which are left aside the dead during the burial process, has an important place. The mausoleums, ziggurats, pyramids, sarcophaguses and tombstones which extant from the ancient eras to today, are related with death and beyond. Death as an inseparable piece of life, therefore dead body, become a subject of art as in architecture. As a subject to art, in the Ancient Rome’s ancestor cult ritual, the portrait that was moulded from dead body’s face; and also Renaissance era and beyond, where the dead body portraiture in oil paint with many different examples. However the most striking and extraordinary application areas exist with the invention of photography, where the dead body photographing process known as post mortem photography. Post mortem photography emerged especially in the 19th century, where the dead bodies were posed in daily clothes, with make-up as if they were alive and were photographed together with other family members; used to embalm the family member according to the conditions of the photography era. In todays art of photography, many artists use dead bodies (or bodies that look like dead) and parts of body as a subject to their works. The historical process of aestheticized dead body or parts of bodies which become a part of art of photography and scrutinizing the works of today’s post mortem photographers, build the aim of this study.
Key Words: Photography, Post Mortem, Dead Body.