Is a (female) corpse just another object like any other to be set in a still life? What displacements and reconfigurations occur when still life imperatives cross the Ophelian artistic tradition? The article examines poetical and photographic reinvestments of the 20th and 21st centuries, in a comparative perspective, the tensions and paradoxes at stake that allow us nonetheless to read these images as contemporary still lifes “with Drowned Girl”. In an explicit dialogue with previous works of still life, the poems and photographs examined combine minute transcription, high focus and sense of the uncanny, a tension between spatiality and temporality, offering highly conscious artworks as means of raising both gender and genre issues.

Is a (female) corpse just another object like any other to be set in a still life? What displacements and reconfigurations occur when still life imperatives cross the Ophelian artistic tradition? The article examines poetical and photographic reinvestments of the 20th and 21st centuries, in a comparative perspective, the tensions and paradoxes at stake that allow us nonetheless to read these images as contemporary still lifes “with Drowned Girl”. In an explicit dialogue with previous works of still life, the poems and photographs examined combine minute transcription, high focus and sense of the uncanny, a tension between spatiality and temporality, offering highly conscious artworks as means of raising both gender and genre issues.