#i've had this thought about season two's usage of photography for a while now and i thought now would be a really great time to explore it

[blackhholes]

Photography and Death in Teen Wolf

Using Photography as an Analogy in the Experience of Death and Mourning by Paula Mahoney / Photography, Memory and Survival by Martin Golding / Visual Codes of Secrecy : Photography of Death and Projective Identification by Julia St George

Written for @teenwolf-meta‘s Meta May Monday theme: power.

In the essay In Plato’s Cave Susan Sontag writes “To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and, therefore, like power.” When examining the power the kanima, and as a result Matt, holds in the second season of the show it’s important to note that initially this power wasn’t all-powerful. It had to be channeled through a conduit. Through photography.

In Fury Matt tells Scott “All I had to do was take their picture, and Jackson would take their life.” Matt’s photos become a sort of pre-mortem death photography, where traditional post-mortem photography serves as a way of immortalizing the recently deceased, the photography of season two acts moreso as an omen. The second their pictures are taken their fate is sealed and Jackson will take their life.

There are limitation to the power of the photograph though, despite Matt photographing Jessica the kanima is incapable of killing her as she is pregnant, this forces Matt to step outside the rules established and once he does he starts to transform into the kanima himself, this allows him to wield Jackson as a weapon without the use of photography and now all he has to do is think about killing someone and Jackson will do it. 

Matt doesn’t uphold the rules he himself created and his hubris in believing he no longer needs the camera to control the kanima and the power he feels he has gained as a result eventually lead to his own death.