Post Mortem Photography

WOOHOO!  can u believe it? I'm in the national library!  AMAZING.  

i managed to drag myself there today after lunch with a Mang.  

I'm sitting in this lane now on L8 checking out this book on post mortem photography.

A new way to look at photographs of death.  

Death loves to be represented... The images can retain some of the obscure, repressed meanings that the written word filters 

out. Hence its power to move us so deeply. 

-Phileppe Aries (1985)

[The photograph] embalms time, rescuing it from its proper condition. 

-Andie Bazin(1967)

Secure the Shadow

Death and Photography in America

Jay Ruby

Secure the Shadow uses a combination of cultural anthropology and visual analysis to explore the photographic representation of death in the US from 1840 to the present. It looks at the ways in which people have taken and used photographs of deceased loved ones and their funerals to mitigate the finality of death.

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 an a deeply felt private need to use pictures of those we love to mourn their loss.  Jay Ruby is  a Professor of Anthropology at Temple University.  He has published extensively in archaeology, popular music, film, television and photography, and has been exploring the relationship between cultures and pictures for the past thirty years.

Anthropology= the science that deals with the origins, physical and cultural development, biological characteristics, and social customs and beliefs of humankind