Contents
| This theme includes example sections and will be revised and added to as we proceed. Suggestions for additions, improvements and the correction of factual errors are always appreciated.
Status: Collect > Document > Analyse > Improve |
Information requests
400.01 Documentary > Improving content on life stages
We are seeking to extend the information and examples we can share on life stages.
- Earliest photographs where photographers have concentrated on a specific period e.g. babies, children, adolescents, middle age, elderly, dead
- Key photographers who have specialized in a life stage
- Major documentary photographic series
These points are indicative of topics that could be included on this page and if you have expertise you would like to share now is the time to get in touch.
If you are able to assist in any way it is appreciated. |
Examples
400.02 Documentary > Nineteenth century post-mortem and memento mori
                                                                       
400.03 Documentary > Post-mortem and memento mori photographs of babies and children
400.04 Documentary > Daguerreotype: Post-mortem portraits
400.05 Documentary > Carte de visites: Post-mortem portraits
400.06 Documentary > Carte de visites: Memorial portraits
   
400.07 Documentary > Cabinet cards: Post-mortem portraits
   
400.08 Documentary > Cabinet cards: Memorial portraits
Marketing death
400.09 Documentary > Marketing: Root's Daguerrean Gallery (1853)
Root's Daguerrean Gallery, The Christian Parlor Magazine, Volume 10, 1853, p.379.
Root's Daguerrean Gallery. There is no place like this in New York for perfect daguerreotypes. Here is displayed a multitude of the most beautiful speeimens of this art, showing the perfection of Mr. Root's mode of taking them. This gentleman has placed in the Crystal Palace some forty or fifty pieces, which attract great attention, and will probably secure the first prize. Any one who has seen them cannot but admire the sharpness of the figure, the perfection of the drapery, and especially the remarkably clear and natural expression of the eye one of the most difficult attainments in this art. No higher testimony can be given to the exellence of Mr. Root's daguerreotypes than the constant press of business on his hands, his rooms being thronged every day with visitors. He succeeds admirably in taking the likenesses of children. And what mother would not love to preserve the infant features of her children to look upon in after years, especially should they be taken away by death. We have rarely seen a more beautiful illustration of this than in the following:
Sweet child, that angel face must fade,
As years shall come and go.
For time doth ever mar the fair
And bright of all below.
But thy fond mother's jealous care
Hath robbed the yawning tomb,
And by the might of art, hath fixed
For e'er thy youthful bloom.
Within her sacred shrine there hangs
In all its infant grace,
On Root's unequaled, perfect plate,
Her darling's glorious face.
Then, mother of the blooming child,
Trust not the fleeting hours,
But, as this mother did by hers,
Do thou at once by yours.
Then, should the sudden dart of death
Your loved one call away,
You'd bless the hint by which you had
The picture done to day,
By Root, 363 Broadway.
Mourning clothing
400.10 Documentary > Mourning clothing
      
Photographers
400.11 Documentary > Sumner & Son (Northfield): The Aftermath of the Northfield Raid (1876)
       
400.12 Documentary > Giorgio Sommer: The ash-covered remains from Pompeii
About this photographer | Photographs by this photographer
     
400.13 Documentary > François Aubert: The execution of Emperor Maximillian
About this photographer | Photographs by this photographer
   
400.14 Documentary > Nadar: Catacombs and subterranean Paris
About this photographer | Photographs by this photographer
        
Spirit photography
400.15 Documentary > Abraham Lincoln as a returning spirit
 
The dead
400.16 Documentary > Lieutenant Colonel Henry Clay, Jr.
  
Henry Clay Jr. (10 April, 1811 – 23 February, 1847) was the third son of US Senator and Congressman Henry Clay. He graduated from West Point and raised a regiment, the 2nd Kentucky Volunteers, to fight in the Mexican American War (1846-1848). He was killed leading a charge of his regiment in the Battle of Buena Vista. The daguerreotypes show his burial site and later his body was transported to Kentucky and interred in Frankfort Cemetery in Frankfort.
400.17 Documentary > Nazi suicides in Leipzig, Germany (1945)
        
Towards the end of the Second World War (1939-1945) when it became apparent that Germany would lose the war and the Third Reich would fall there were a series of mass suicides in Leipzig. The motivations for the suicides were the collapse of the Nazi Party and its ideology and the fear of retribution from the Allied forces that were entering the homeland.
On the 18th April 1945 a number of officials of Leizig commited suicide in the New Town Hall (Neues Rathaus). It is the photographs of the office of the Deputy Mayor Dr. jur. Ernst Kurt Lisso with his wife Renate Stephanie and daughter Regina Lisso photographed on or around 20th April 1945 by Lee Miller, Margaret Bourke-White, Robert Capa and J Malan Heslop who was a U.S Army Signal Corps photographer that show the scene.
The daughter is wearing a nurses cap.
400.18 Documentary > Walter Schels: Life before Death
About this photographer | Photographs by this photographer
           
"We all know that we are going to die one day, but it is very difficult to believe that it will really happen to us. Our motivation for this project was to overcome our own fear of facing up to death. The project goes some way to explore this."
© Walter Schels and Beate Lakotta
400.19 Documentary > Jack Burman: The Dead
About this photographer | Photographs by this photographer
           
Seven Questions
Why did you decide it was important to depict death in your photographic work?
Sebald wrote that “Physicality is most strongly sculpted and its ‘nature’ most perceptible on the indistinct borderline with transcendency.” I seek to work near the body & to place the work on that borderline.
What would you say is the purpose, if any, of your post-mortem photography work? Are you just photographing the bodies, or do you seek something more?
I seek some of the presence of the body. The strength of damage & loss. The hardness & motions of time as laid on & under the skin. The feel.
As with all things that challenge our denial of death, the macabre and unsettling tone of your pictures could be regarded by some as obscene and disrespectful. Were you interested in a particular shock value, and how do you feel towards the taboo nature of your subject?
Do you remember the girl’s hair at the start of Garcia Marquez’s Of Love and Other Demons? The hair is the girl’s years, eyes, nerves. Thus each hand & face.
When I enter the privacy of the dead it is with slow hard respect for their hands, arms, shoulders & eyes. The very few who take my prints into their hands & rooms—those I know of—see with the same discipline.
Was it difficult to approach the specimens, on a personal level?
No; never.
Are there any particular and interesting anecdotes regarding the circumstances of some of your photographs?
Some time ago the work led to a town in the Peruvian Andes. Each morning at dawn a herd of alpacas was led to pasture down a narrow alley beyond the wall the bed was against. Their movement came up the wall through the bed as a series of vibrations. It was interesting at that point to get up & go to work with the dead of the 1500’s.
Would you like a post-mortem picture to be taken of you after you die?
Yes—provided the person who took it saw with my eyes, my past, my need.
How would you like to imagine that photo?
Clear; dark; damaged; plain; light-riddled.
400.20 Documentary > Frank Rodick: Portraits (2012)
About this photographer | Photographs by this photographer
    
Frank Rodick wrote this text in response to Irina Chmyreva's request for a statement regarding his work. Dr. Chmyreva is curating Rodick's exhibition, Faces Interred (October 2012, Krasnodar, Russia).
When artists write about their own work, what they usually come up with is an explanation or interpretation. They—we—try to answer the question What’s this work really all about?
The question is a good one and it's reasonable to ask it. But I’m not comfortable answering it, especially with this work. Whatever motivated me, whatever questions I was asking, whatever itch I was trying to scratch—the pictures are my answer. I think—I know— they’re a better answer than what I could tell you with words.
I’ll leave the interpretations to people more inclined and better suited to do just that. If you, dear viewer, take the time to look carefully at these pictures and say what you think is going on, well, I want you to know that I’m honoured by that.
What I will do is tell you the story behind these portraits. No, I’ll tell you a story, because I wouldn’t presume it’s the conclusive story, or that there even is one. One thing I know is how nebulous and muddy things get when it comes to the motives and emotions that exist within and between human beings.
Besides, I can’t say everything . . . and I’m certain the pictures know more than I do.
Frances Rodick gave birth to me. She lived a long time—long enough to be scarred by the Great Depression, to sit in front of the family TV set showing Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, and to see the Twin Towers collapse. She lived long enough to see her family grow modestly, and then—through madness, disease, and rancor—wither. Long enough to develop a sharp and stormy mind and then lose it, piece by piece but in the end completely.
My mother was born into a life that would be one degree of separation from a great catastrophe that was acutely personal and terribly historical. She gave that horror a home inside herself, powered by a dark energy that snaked its way through every day, every corner, of her life. Through a process more relentless than calculated, she made sure that nightmare would, in an evolving incarnation, breathe and whisper inside me as well.
Frances' life and mine showed me that Ibsen was right: sin and mayhem will run through generations, like blood through an artery. And just as quietly.
In 2004, over six hazy days, I cremated my father and then institutionalized my mother, whose mind and body had fallen apart. As part of “managing things” I started the job of sifting through their belongings. These were people who saved everything. Just in case.
I found these photographs of my mother from 1942—the time when, unknown to her, her life's darkest star was beginning to burn most fiercely. They became my starting point. My father, Jack, took most of the pictures that came after—he loved photographing Frances—but not these. I don’t know who took them, just the date, written on the back.
After my father's death, my mother endured another six years of what might lazily be called life, existing in that crippled body and razed mind. One afternoon she looked at me and asked in a soft but clear voice, Did I ever have children? I told her “Yes, one,” but it took only that long for her mind to sink back into some other, unknown, world.
There are dozens of clichés about the death of one’s parents. Maybe the most common is the one that says it’s a reminder you’re next, that your time is coming. I don’t think that happened with me. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I was already fairly acquainted with mortality’s fact, even my own.
Watching my parents struggle I did see some of death’s work from up close. The way it makes seconds stretch into years and years collapse into moments. The way it makes doing that one last thing impossible: those words never said or taken back, that question never asked, the blessing wished for but never given.
There are things I admired about my mother. Her specific kind of generosity, with others if not herself. Her sense of humour. The way she rejected God and Heaven with unconcern, in spite of a life that wasn’t easy.
At her worst, Frances Rodick colluded with the spirits that tortured her, discharging an enraged and jagged pain into a shrunken world that in her own modest way she managed to mutilate if not destroy.
It was after her death that I started work on these images. I thought the timing was a coincidence, but maybe not. I forget who it was who said artists should create as if their parents are dead—because a parent can be the most insidious censor, the kind that does its business straight out of one’s mind and belly.
I began by laying out these old photos—pictures of Frances, and others too. I looked through my parents’ documents and papers, as many as I could find. Some were old—birth certificates, letters, business documents—and some more recent: wills, notes on medical care, the do-not-resuscitate orders and death certificates. Parts of the text you see on some of my pictures came from those documents.
I never had a plan in making this work.
Maybe these pictures of Frances are a kind of biography—of her, of me, of her and me stitched together in that sad and harrowing way we never stopped being. If they are, they’re a kind of hallucinatory biography, because, in the end, one hazards only a tremulous guess at knowing other people, including oneself and—especially—one’s parents. But if they are hallucinations, maybe they’re the kind Louis-Ferdinand Céline talked about: those fictions—some shining, some terrible—those fictions that are more real than everyday life itself. Sometimes that’s how it feels to me, and, as I think about it, that may even be where the remains of my hopes lie.
Text copyright 2012 Frank Rodick
alan@luminous-lint.com |
General reading
Burns, Stanley, 2011, Sleeping Beauty III: Memorial Photography: The Children, (Burns Press) isbn-13: 978-1936002047 [Δ]
Burns, Stanley B, & Burns, Elizabeth, 2002, Sleeping Beauty II: Grief, Bereavement and the Family in Memorial Photography, American & European Traditions, (New York: Burns Archive Press) [Δ]
Meinwald, Dan, 1990, ‘Memento Mori: Death in Nineteenth Century Photography‘, CMP Bulletin, California Museum of Photography, vol.9, no.4 [Δ]
Mord, Jack, 2011, Beyond the Dark Veil: Postmortem and Memorial Photography from The Thanatos Archive, (The Thanatos Archive) isbn-10: 0615518141 isbn-13: 978-0615518145 [Δ]
Ruby, Jay, 1984, July-September, ‘Post-mortem Photography in America‘, History of Photography, vol.8, no.3, pp.201-222 [Δ]
Ruby, Jay, 1985, Secure the Shadow: Death and photography in America, (The MIT Press) isbn-10: 0262181649 isbn-13: 978-0262181648 [Δ]
Readings on, or by, individual photographers
Jack Burman
Burman, Jack, 2010, The Dead, (The Magenta Foundation) isbn-13: 978-1926856001 [Δ]
Lee Friedlander
Friedlander, Lee, 2003, Staglieno, (Nazraeli Press) isbn-10: 1590050398 isbn-13: 978-1590050392 [Δ]
Nadar
Nadar, Félix, 1982, Le Paris Souterrain de Félix Nadar 1861, (Caisse nationale des monuments historiques et des sites) isbn-10: 2858220557 isbn-13: 9782858220557 [Δ]
Marcus Aurelius Root
1853, ‘Root's Daguerrean Gallery‘, The Christian Parlor Magazine, vol.10, pp.379 [Δ]
If you feel this list is missing a significant book or article please let me know - Alan - alan@luminous-lint.com
Jack Burman (1949-) • Carl Durheim (1810-1890) • Félix Feuardent • Spring Hurlbut (1952-) • John Plumbe Jr. (1809-1857) • Frank Rodick (1959-) • Walter Schels (1936-) | Home > Themes > Documentary > Life stages > Dead
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