Fine Art Photography and the Dead

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WARNING
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Today, this Page contains GRAPHIC photographs of the DEAD.

Proceed only with the understanding that you may be disturbed.

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When we think of the visual arts, we don't always envision the dead, other than in a metaphorical or symbolic way. Without going into the history of drawn, painted, and sculpted depictions (Goya et al), there are visual artists, however, who include the dead in their work, the most (in)famous photographers being Joel-Peter Witkin and Andrés Serrano, among others. These photographers who utilize the human cadaver in the name of art, can sometimes provide us with powerful insights into our own mortality and corporeal fragility, not to mention our fears and prejudices.

One can associate Joel-Peter Witkin's work with a Gothic look at art history and human sexuality, often conflated with the body and its distorted or discarded parts. Sometimes Romantic, often disturbing, always provocative, Witkin's work examines our reluctance to associate life, death, art, deformities, sex and religion together in one image.

 Andrés Serrano, on the other hand, photographs the dead with no pretense at making it palatable, other than to shield the individual from revealing their identity. His subjects include the tragically dead, accident and murder victims, and the unclaimed. He examines the details, seemingly to allow us to look for clues of their demise in their lips, fingernails, skin, and expression in their eyes.

Other photographers who have delved into the literal realm of human death include Jack Berman.  Berman's photographs from time in Latin America record medical specimens, body fragments, and portraits, but also show us an aesthetic attachment to fine art traditions. See an on-line portfolio of his Last Rites in Canadian Art Magazine. <<NEW>> On June 8, 2010, The National Post published an article about Berman and his work. Also see my July 1st, 2010 entry on Berman's new book.

Walter Schels and his partner Beate Lakotta recorded interviews with their subjects in their final days, revealing much about dying - and living. He made close-up portraits showing them in both life and death. A powerful body of work ensued. “People are almost always pretending something, but these people had lost that need,” Mr. Schels told the Guardian. “I felt it enabled me as a photographer to get as close as it’s possible to get to the core of a person; when you’re facing the end, everything that’s not real is stripped away. You’re the most real you’ll ever be, more real than you’ve ever been before.”

To see more of his amazing collection of portraits go to the Guardian's pages.

Morbid Anantomy

I highly recommend a look at a fantastic weblog where the topics fall into the same dark sphere as mine: Morbid Anatomy.

Run by a Brooklyn graphic designer since 2007, it is a great list of goings-on in the greater NYC area and the world at large. It includes a long list of great on-line exhibitions, anatomical links and other website references, a Morbid Anatomy Bookstore, and much more. It is hard to resist exploring this site and its amazing links for hours at a time....  Morbid Anatomy's Flicker page is an FANTASTIC collection of images previously featured in the weblog.

Another on-line set of post-mortem portrait photographs can be found on the Flicker page of The Post Mortem Archive. Not many, but nice examples.


More From My Post-Mortem Portrait Archive: 
From my postmortem collection, these fine examples illustrate a variety of fascinating styles used in this portrait tradition. Today I continue to feature a selection from my own physical archive. This weblog will be the only on-line resource for these images.

From the opulence and high-style of the late nineteenth century, we move to a poignant backyard snapshot from the early twentieth century. In all these cases, it is evident that the photograph was taken when the deceased was still at home. It is only later in the early 20th C that we begin to see portraits made at funeral homes. (see last photo, below)

This collection has grown to 230 images, most of which are from the 19th Century. I will continue to post examples here, but I would also like to feature more books from my library as well. Any suggestions from you? Please feel free to leave a comment. Thanks.

Motorcycle Funerals

While I driving around in the UK at the end of February, I didn't see any motorcycle funerals. Too wet, I suppose. But this site illustrates that the motorcycle hearse has been available to UK bikers for over 22 years. At www.motorcyclefunerals.com Managing Director Rev. Paul Sinclair believes we should reflect people's lifestyles in their funerals.

Although my own photographic/art practice is focused on old, decrepit cemeteries and related themes, I know there is a world of current funerary practice out there that would be fascinating to the sociologist, cultural anthropologist, or historian. I suppose I don't pursue that avenue of exploration because of a reticence to intrude on people's privacy during difficult times. I am more interested in the decaying visual remains of a Gothic Victorian past; when death, funerals, and memorials were a bigger part of life; when people participated in an overtly fashionable act of mourning.

A good book about this glorious past is James Stevens Curl's The Victorian Celebration of Death. [Phoenix Mill (UK): Sutton Publishing Ltd. 2000] This is a well researched history (PhD dissertation) of 19th C. attitudes, contexts and traditions surrounding the growth of the Victorian Celebration and Mourning of the dead. For a dissertation about 19th C. American funeral practice and attitudes towards death, see Gary Laderman's The Sacred Remains: American Attitudes Towards Death, 1799-1883. [New Haven: Yale University Press. 1996]

For those interested in current European funeral practice, in my first blog entry I pointed out Thanatorama. This French site (with English subtitles) features an inter-active audio-visual presentation to guide you through the immediate "afterlife" where you are the recently deceased. It is a fascinating journey through the cultural constructs of the funeral: embalming or cremation, and rites of burial as practiced in France today. Extremely well done. BUT be forewarned. There are a few images of actual corpses here...nothing gross or disrespectful, but a very informative story and well worth the journey.

Grave Portraits

Among my favorite discoveries when exploring cemeteries are the little faces we find adhered to gravestones. These usually oval cameo portraits may be common in one cemetery, but are usually rare in most. The older versions are much more common in parts of Europe, or cemeteries associated with a particular cultural or ethnic group. The technology is such that they are among the most permanent form of photographic imaging processes known. Some are fired ceramic. Others fired enamel. When looking on-line recently, it seems that there has been a resurgence of this service in North America even with references to digitally printed photo-tiles. These are still fired onto porcelain as before, for permanence. See this site for an example of current applications.
 
These photographs are from an old cemetery on the East-bound road to Dugald, Manitoba, in an area with Eastern European ancestry. I photographed them one sunny March day in 1980 where I discovered this tradition for the first time.

It is interesting to compare the above with this unique plaque found in a small Newfoundland cemetery near McIvors. It is odd in that is not of the living person, but of his corpse. There are no other photo-plaques in this cemetery (yet).

A permanent likeness of the deceased on their last resting place has been a long-standing tradition, as illustrated this Mummy portrait of a young woman, 2nd century, Louvre, Paris. (...and let's not forget Tutankhamen.)


This tradition was also seen in the 17th Century as well. See Wikipedia's entry which includes this coffin portrait (right) of Barbara Domicela Lubomirska née Szczawinska, 1676. Oil on tin plate. Current location is the National Museum in Warsaw, Poland. It became a tradition to decorate coffins of deceased nobles (szlachta) with such funerary art in the times of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, particularly in the 17th and 18th centuries, the time of the baroque in Poland and Sarmatism. This tradition was virtually unknown outside the Commonwealth.

In Italy we found along with 20th C photo-plaques beautiful 19th C bas relief portrait sculptures. Most are very accomplished, as one would expect in this land of great marble sculpture. Some of these images are from Cortona in Tuscany, others from de Cementerio de San Michele in Isola near Venice.

Epitaphiana

Sorry for the long delay... I'm back now, so here is a little tidbit to keep you interested.

There are many websites which list the witty and often apocryphal epitaphs found on tombstones. For example, a Wild West headstone in the Boothill Graveyard in Tombstone, Cochise County, Arizona, USA, bears the classic epitaph:

Here lies Lester Moore, four slugs from a .44, no Les, no more.

One of many web-pages with a list of these witty couplets is at this link. But for a more historical and complete catalogue, see this book from the 19th Century which archives many epitaphs from ye olde English graveyards (pre 1870's). It is reproduced in full at the Internet Archive Open Library, and is entitled:

Epitaphiana or, The curiosities of churchyard literature, being a miscellaneous collection of epitaphs with an introduction giving an account of various customs prevailing amongst the ancients and moderns in the disposal of their dead.

by William Fairley

Published in 1875, S. Tinsley (London)

Here is an embedded reader courtesy of Internet Archive Open Library which presents the book in its entirety, enjoy:

F. Gonzalez-Crussi

Two books I acquired turned out to be among the best I've read on the subject of death. First, they do not sensationalize. Second, they are nearly poetic in their examination of the processes of life to death. Written by Dr. F. Gonzalez-Crussi, who in the 1990's was head of laboratories and professor of pathology at the Children's Memorial Hospital of Northwestern University in Chicago. He ponders death from his unusual perspective of, as he puts it, "a corpse handler" in his earlier book, Notes of an Anatomist, and continues where he left off in the essays within these books. His thoughts and writings emanate from his experience surrounding death and his "communion with the dead".  Suspended Animation, six essays on the preservation of bodily parts, is also illustrated with the amazing photographs of Rosamond W. Purcell. (Harcourt—Brace & Co.  1995)

His essays and her photographs within this book are poetical in nature, personal, and full of the awe and reverence of a writer and a photographer who truly respect both the physical processes and the nature of our brief time here on earth. The essays examine the various ways in which we try to preserve remnants of our physical existence. Chapter titles are: 

• Microcosm in a Bottle
• Of Flaying, Dismemberment, and other Inconveniences
• Bologna, The Learned
• Waxing Philosophical ... and a bit Hypersensitive
• How We Come to Be
• Nature's Lapses

... plus a Photographer's Note from Purcell. The photographs are rich still life details made in medical and anatomy collections in Spain, Italy and the USA.

An earlier book from Dr. Gonzalez-Crussi centers around a return to his homeland to revisit Mexico's Day of the Dead, the long tradition of the cemetery vigils of November 2. In this little book, also from Harcourt—Brace & Co. 1993, The Day of the Dead and Other Mortal Reflections, we find these chapters:

• A Visit to the Embalmer, 
• The Grin of the Calavera, 
• Of Skulls in a Heap and Soft Parts in Glass Jars, 
• Two Unrecorded Scenes, 
• Moonlight Autopsy, 
• Lights, Camera, Stillness! Death and the Visual Arts.

It explores many facets and perceptions, times and locations, all written in a wonderfully immediate and personal tone.

Continuing with the theme of today's entry, I include here an image of a stereo card in my collection. It is from "The Edinburgh Atlas of Anatomy" and is of the dissected human thorax. The over-sized yellow card has the explanatory text on the back and was doubtlessly used by medical students and anatomists in the late 19th or early 20th Century. One can see this image in full 3-D with a traditional stereo viewer.

Carved Skulls

When I was browsing for images of skulls, I came across these examples of intricately carved human skulls. They are apparently quite old and from Asia, and with a Buddhist connection, although I can't be sure. All I can say is that they are incredible in their detail and beauty. The patina of age and the imagery on each one is amazing. I wish I knew more about the graphic symbolism and their actual provenance. Maybe one of my readers can enlighten us.

Skull One:

 

 Or Skull Two:

And the best – Skull Three:

One can assume that these are now hidden away in a personal collection somewhere. I wonder what the ethical ramifications are for possessing something like this. Where were they taken from in the first place? And of course, the eternal question: Who were they?

The need to memorialize or even sanctify physical remains is certainly not new, as illustrated above. But what about today? We can't legally retain and decorate the bones of our relatives, so what can we do? Maybe we can have something as beautiful as these skulls by creating a reliquary for their ashes. There are many serious artists who are crafting beautiful urns and boxes to hold cremains. I assume they are not intended for burial. At Funeria one can find the most exquisite reliquaries. Their website opens with this on their portfolio page:

Sleeping Beauties

One of the seeds of my interest in postmortem portraiture was planted when I saw the book Sleeping Beauties: Memorial Photography in America. This beautiful hard-cover collection was edited from the Dr. Stanley Burns Archive and published in 1990 by TwelveTrees Press. The first edition is now quite valuable. It was followed in 2002 with Sleeping Beauties II: Grief, Bereavement and the Family in Memorial Photography. American and European Traditions published by the Burns Archive Press. Both fairly large books have gilt text on the plain black cover. The photograph collections within are among the best examples of postmortem portraiture you will find anywhere.

An excerpt from the Burns Archive Website describes Dr. Burns and his collection's origin below:

In 1975, Dr. Stanley B. Burns, an eye surgeon and vision specialist practicing in New York City, became interested in daguerreotypes and other early photographs. By 1978, Dr. Burns had acquired, through aggressive buying and connoisseurship, one of America's most important collections of early photography. 

In 1988, the Burns Archive moved into its permanent headquarters, a New York townhouse built in 1890, at 140 East 38th Street.

My own collection was in response to these. It is important to consider that all of these images are virtually one-of-a-kind. Literally so for the daguerreotypes, ambrotypes and tintypes. Most likely so for cartes-des-visite and cabinet cards because of the small chance of duplicates surviving so long. Even other prints were likely in the personal collections of the immediate family, so only rarely do I come across more than one copy. So, like the Sleeping Beauties books, here are more examples from:

The Post-Mortem Portrait Archive: 
From my postmortem collection, these examples are among my favorites. The first is a 1860-65 tintype in a daguerreotype case in which the face was slightly hand-tinted. An amazing photo, equally as good as any in the Burns Archive.

An interesting trend for some early 20th Century examples, is the vertical format baby wearing a white Christening gown. There seems to be an attempt to make the child look angelic and serene. These three similar Edwardian examples are printed 12-13 cm by 9-10 cm and mounted onto embossed card stock.

 

This one had written on the back: "Lester L. Shire, 3 mos. 5 dys".

 

These two little cartes-des-visite from the 1870's(?) are also amazing in their sensitivity and elegance.

The little girl in the chair seems to be watching the camera, but the tell-tale signs of death make it clear that she is not seeing anything. One of the saddest revelations from looking at these images is the reality of the death of these children. One sometimes forgets this when we are distracted by the beauty of the work.