Sometimes thought to be a bizarre Victorian custom, photographing corpses has been and continues to be an important, if not common, occurrence in American life. Why not death? A logical question, perhaps, but one that makes many twentieth-century Americans uncomfortable. Life is commemorated through photographs. It provides a witness-one thought to be unimpeachable and permanent. Photography's amazing popularity over the last century and a half is undoubtedly due to its capacity to help us remember people, places, and events. The sentiment provides an apt title for a book that examines photographic images of the dying, death, and funerals, and how they are used to mourn and memorialize. 32) is one of photography's earliest advertising cliches, predating George Eastman's "you push the button, we do the rest" by half a century. "Secure the Shadow, Ere the Substance Fade, I Let Nature imitate what Nature made" (Newhall 1982, p. It focuses on the ways in which people have taken and used photographs of deceased loved ones and their funerals to mitigate the finality of death. Secure the Shadow is an exploration of the photographic representation of death in the United States from 1840 to the present. Uses of Death-Related Photography Distribution and Frequency of Occurance Motivation Appendix: Glossary of Photographic Terms Notes Bibliography Index Introduction: Seeing Death A Reflexive Interlude A Social Approach to Photography I Head The News Today, Oh Boy ONE Precursors: Mortuary and Posthumous Paintings Mortuary Portraits Posthumous Mourning Paintings TWO One Last Image: Postortem and Funeral Photography False Conceptions and Misperceptions Styles of Photographically Representing the Dead Family Funeral Photographs and Narrative Scenes of Grief Mourning Portraits and Jewelry THREE Memorial Photography Public Memorial Representations Memorial Photographs Memorial and Funeral Cards Floral Memorial Photographs Illustrated Tombstones FOUR Conclusion: A Social Analysis of Death-Related Photographs
André Basin TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements
embalms time, rescuing it from its proper codition. Death and photography seem to have a basic relationship but it is illusionary, for the camera does not depict death, it only shows how someone else saw it. They can preserve the past, promise the future, and transpose yesterday into tomorrow. Philippe Ariés ĭeath prevades the landscape of photography, for cameras are weapons that steal life and magical machines that defy death. Death loves to be represented.The image can retain some ofthe obscure, repressed meanings that the written word filters out.
0 kommentar(er)
