Product Details
Hardcover
232 pages
The MIT Press
Published 1995
Book Description
Secure the Shadow uses a combination of cultural anthropology and visual analysis to explore the photographic representations of death in the United States 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 and a deeply felt private need to use pictures of those we love to mourn their loss.
About the Author
Jay Ruby is 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. |
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