Alexa Hagerty

In Still Life with Bones, anthropologist Alexa Hagerty learns to see the dead body with a forensic eye.

She examines bones for evidence of torture and fatal wounds but also for signs of a life lived: to articulate how life shapes us down to the bone. In the tenderness of understanding these bones, Hagerty discovers how exhumation serves as a ritual in the naming and placement of the dead, and connects ancestors with future generations. She shows us how this work can bring meaning to families dealing with unimaginable loss, and how its symbolic force can also extend to entire societies in the aftermath of state terror and genocide.

Weaving together powerful stories about investigative breakthroughs, grieving families, histories of violence, and her own forensic coming of age, Hagerty crafts a moving portrait of the living and the dead.