"I engage a number of theories on photography in the book. Sontag’s insistence that when photography 'bears witness to the calamitous and the reprehensible' it is often criticized if it seems 'too much like art' turned out to be particularly relevant for some of the photographed bog bodies I worked with. I ended up arguing, however, that onlookers of bog body photographs appear to escape the embarrassment of ‘indecent’ aesthetic objectification. Nevertheless, Sontag’s points about ethics and aesthetics prompted me to think harder about how distance in time can be said to have lifted disturbing actualities from bog body photographs."

Recommended by Karin Sanders, Professor of Scandinavian and author of Bodies in the Bog and the Archaeological Imagination.