The Undertakers' Supply Co. Catalog

Specialty trades can be mysterious enough without trying to understand the tools they use, the supplies they go through, and the way they communicate these needs to each other. Jargon meant to be exclusive to those in the know, is at times disconcerting to the uninitiated. For example, I have an empty bottle of embalming fluid labeled Frigid Jr. with a picture of a fat healthy smiling baby on it. It is supposed to be specially formulated for babies .... what can I say?

I managed to find a ca 1920 copy of the Undertakers' Supply Co. Catalog. (I've depended on eBay for a long time...) The catalog lists everything an embalmer could possibly need as well as furnishings for the funeral service and viewing. There is a section on special cases, diseases, and conditions that require special treatment, precautions, or materials. Here are a few pages which give one an idea of what early morticians and undertakers were shopping for. 

[for larger views, click on the image]

BlackFlash Magazine

Volume 26.1, 2008 issue of BlackFlash Magazine, a photo, art, and theory magazine from Saskatoon, SK, Canada, featured my new suite of prints in their Death Issue. Here are most of the images or page spreads that were created for this project. For the first time in my art practice, I used appropriated images scanned from my own collections. You may recognize the casket photos from an earlier blog entry.  Included in this suite was a poignant excerpt from Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters, a must-read for all literary driven thanatophiles. A good on-line full text source is here.

These passports are from all over (Turkey, Argentina, Canada, Italy) and include my intrepid traveling aunt and my own taxi license from when I was a young university student.

These glass negatives are from a junk shop located in Butte, Montana. I was especially attracted to the damaged ones, although I also obtained a collection of amazing portraits from the late 19th to early 20th century.

This page of old studio photographs with the empty portrait settings were made from scans of vintage prints and tintypes where I digitally removed the sitter; their absence being a poignant reminder of loss and fading memory.

The above grid is made up of images from my collection of port mortem portraits of young children that I am building. You will see (and have seen) selections from this collections periodically on this blog.

And finally, this page spread of skulls was gleaned from the internet and represents a wide range of individuals. What I find especially interesting, is that they all seem to maintain their own identity and even personality. The numbers alone allude to our uncountable predecessors and the nameless faces that once were.

Japanese Death Poems

I have a wonderful book of Japanese Haiku called Japanese Death Poems: Written by Zen Monks and Haiku Poets on the Verge of Death. compiled by Yoel Hoffmann (Chas. A. Tuttle Pub. Co. Inc. 1986)

Here are a few poignant examples:

RANGAI (d. 1845, aged 75)

I wish to die                                                  Fuji-no-yama

a sudden death with eyes                         minagara shitaki

fixed on Mount Fuji.                                        tonshi kana

NANDAI  (d. 1817, aged 31)

Since time began                                             Kanete naki

the dead alone know peace.                     mi koso yasukere

Life is but melting snow.                               yuki no michi

KYO'ON  (d. 1749, aged 63)

A last fart:                                                 Yume no ha ka

are these the leaves                             chiru sharakusashi

of my dream, vainly falling?                           saigo no he

KASENJO  (d. 1776, aged 62)

Depths of cold                                               Okusoko no

unfathomable                                      shirenu samusa ya

ocean roar.                                                      umi no oto

SENCHOJO  (d. 1802)

I cup my ears                                              Unohana ni

among the deutzia lest I fail                    kikisokonawaji

to hear the cuckoo.                                       hototogisu

TOYOKUNI  (d. 1825)

Is it like                                                      Yakifude no

a charcoal sketch—                           mama ka oboro ni

a hazy shadow?                                             kagebōshi

BOKUSUI  (d. 1914, aged 40)

A parting word?                                           Jisei nado

The melting snow                              zansetsu ni ka mo

is odorless.                                                  nakarikeri

TOKO (d. 1795, aged 85)

Death poems                                             Jisei to wa
are mere delusion—                         sunawachi mayoi
death is death.                                         tada shinan

The Zen of death is a very different way of looking at the issue of life and its final chapter .... one that I am not really very well versed in. I have always come at it from a physiological/biological point of view; not a very comforting stance. I appreciate the poetic but concrete reality of how these monks address the issue. Maybe that is why I like the poems with their pragmatic but dark nihilistic view. (like the last one, above)

Although not a haiku, this poem by Moriya Sen'an (d. 1838) showed an expectation of an entertaining afterlife:

Bury me when I die                                     Ware shinaba

beneath a wine barrel                         sakaya no kame no

in a tavern.                                                  shita ni ikeyo

With luck                                          moshi ya shizuku no

the cask will leak.                                      moriyasennan

And finally, Death, with calligraphy by Japanese Zen master Hakuin (1685-1768). The poem is written above the character (shi, death), as below:

Wakaishu ya

shinu ga iya nara

ima shiniyare

hito-tabi shineba

mō shinanu zo ya


Oh young folk—
if you fear death,
die now!
Having died once
you won't die again.

Murder Miniatures

Scenes of murder, mayhem, and doll furniture..........

The incredibly detailed miniature dioramas of Franses Glessner Lee are featured in a book called The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death (essay and photos by Corinne May Botz), New York: The Monacelli Press, 2004. Lee, a master criminal investigator, a grandmother, and founder of the Department of Legal Medicine at Harvard in 1936, was also captain in the New Hampshire police. In the 1940's and 50's she built doll house sized crime scenes based on real cases in order to train detectives to assess visual evidence.

Still used in forensic training today, the book contains wonderfully detailed images of the eighteen Nutshell dioramas that were painstaking built by Lee. The window shades work, the newspaper has text on it, the pencils write, all at a scale of 1:12. Everything is there: the furnishings, wallpaper, carpets, clothing, blood stains, and spent cartridge casings. She made all the clothing and even hand-knit a victim's underwear using thread and straight pins.

The book includes annotations, diagrams, details and clues that you, the reader, use to trace and understand the actual events depicted by the model. Some details and answers are withheld, as these dioramas are still used by the police for training.

Death by misadventure has spawned a whole series of books and websites that border on what one might call trauma-porn. Grotesque images "borrowed" from police files of gunshot head-wounds, major physical trauma, etc. are not something that has any redeeming aesthetic qualities.

We sometimes find re-published collections of crime-scene photographs usually compiled by law enforcement officials as a record of cases they were involved in from before the advent of databases and officially organized forensic records. Many detectives used photography as a personal notational record, or maybe a perversely morbid scrapbook. Some of these are fascinating, although sobering when we face actual images of the fragility of the human body or the outcome of the dark side of human violence.



The use of photography as a forensic tool began with the famous Alphonse Bertillon, a late 19th, early 20th C. French police officer and biometrics researcher who created anthropometry, an identification system based on physical measurements. Anthropometry was the first scientific system used by police to identify criminals. Before that time, criminals could only be identified based on unreliable eyewitness accounts. The method was eventually supplanted by fingerprinting, but his other contributions like the mug shot and the systematization of crime-scene photography remain in place to this day. [text from wikipedia]

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.