The concept of endings suggests that the whole idea can be perceived not only in one way. The article concentrates on a theory that in the very beginning there was an end and it initiated everything. Furthermore, the moment when something ends is inseparably connected with the conception of something else. There is no clear definition of ending, because it may concern many different circumstances, and its consequences may be often various. The end is obviously strongly related to death and Diddy, the protagonist of Death Kit by Susan Sontag. The complexity of the main character is presented by his various nicknames. The man committed suicide, and this act, altogether with illness, is treated as a halfway to death. The way itself seems to be an important aspect in the plot due to dying hallucinations that Diddy experiences. The fatal attempt of the protagonist was successful, and the whole adventure in the novel is deceptive. Life is substituted with appearances of life, thus everything described never takes place, in fact.
The work aims to show a peculiar perspective of looking at photographs taken on the eve of the broadly understood disaster, which is specified in a slightly different way in each of the literary texts (Stefan Chwin’s autobiographical novel Krótka historia pewnego żartu [The brief history of a certain joke], a poem by Ryszard Kapuściński Na wystawie „Fotografia chłopów polskich do 1944 r.” [At an exhibition “The Polish peasants in photographs to 1944”] and Wisława Szymborska’s Fotografia z 11 września [Photograph from September 11]) – as death in a concentration camp, a general concept of the First World War or a terrorist attack. Upcoming tragic events – of which the photographed people are not yet aware – become for the subsequent recipient an inseparable element of reality contained in the frame. For the later observers, privileged with time perspective, the characters captured in the photograph are already victims of the catastrophe, which in reality was not yet recorded by the camera. It is a work about coexistence of the past and future in the field of photography.
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