Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in AmericaDeath and the way society comes to terms with it have become a major area of scholarly and popular interest, as evidenced in the work of such well-known figures as Philippe Aries and Elisabeth Kubler Ross. Photographs and other forms of pictorial imagery play an important role in these investigations. "Secure the Shadow" is an original contribution that lies at the intersection of cultural anthropology and visual analysis, a field that Jay Ruby's previous writings have helped to define. It explores the photographic representation of death in the United States from 1840 to the present, focusing on the ways in which people have taken and used photographs of deceased loved ones and their funerals to mitigate the finality of death.Sometimes thought to be a bizarre Victorian custom, photographing corpses has been and continues to be an important, if not recognized, occurrence in American life. It is a photographic activity, like the erotica produced in middle-class homes by married couples, that many privately practice but seldom circulate outside the trusted circle of close friends and relatives. Along with tombstones, funeral cards, and other images of death, these photographs represent one way in which Americans have attempted to secure their shadows.Ruby employs newspaper accounts, advertisements, letters, photographers' account books, interviews, and other material to determine why and how photography and death became intertwined in the nineteenth century. He traces this century's struggle between America's public denial of death and a deeply felt private need to use pictures of those we love to mourn their loss. Americans take and use photographs of dead relatives and friends in spite of and not because of society's expectation about the propriety of these means. Ruby compares photographs and other pictorial media of death, founding his interpretations on the discovery of patterns in the appearance of the images and a reconstruction of the conditions of their production and utilization. |
Contents
Mortuary and Posthumous Paintings | 27 |
Memorial Photography | 113 |
four | 147 |
Copyright | |
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album albumen print American artistic baby bereaved body cabinet card cabinet card courtesy camera cardboard mount cabinet carte de visite casket cemeteries Center for Visual coffin commemorate copyright 1992 corpse cultural custom daguerreotype Darrah dead child died family members figure floral flowers funeral directors funeral photographs gelatin silver print graphs grief grieving History of Photography inches courtesy Jay Ruby Lincoln living Lloyd loved memorial card Mifflintown monuments mother mount cabinet card mourners mourning pictures mourning portrait nineteenth century Oil on canvas painter parents Pearl Jones Pennsylvania personal communication Philadelphia Photograph of unidentified photographic tombstones pictorial placed plate courtesy popular portrait pose posthumous mourning paintings postmortem images Postmortem photograph practice print on cardboard produced professional photographers representation Rochester Ruby snapshots social Southworth Southworth & Hawes stereograph Strong Museum take pictures taken tesy tintype tion tographs tombstones unidentified child University Visual Communication Wisconsin Death Trip woman York