Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America
by Stanley Burns
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Book Summary Information
Author: Stanley BurnsEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1990-11
ISBN: 0942642325
Number of pages: 132
Publisher: Twelvetrees Pr
Book Reviews of Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America
Book Review: 'Ere the substance fade
Summary: 5 Stars
When I first discovered Victorian postmortem photography, I was intrigued, having always found death and decay in art equally as interesting as birth and growth. Setting out to find these "death pictures" as she described them, I came upon Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America. Dr. Burns presents not only an impressive collection, but a thorough preface about the history of postmortem photography and its rise and fall in popularity. He follows the collection with descriptive captions and backstory for every picture, and an index of a full chronology of Death in America and related, and a guide on identifying photos by era.
The collection of photographs begins with the quote "Secure the shadow `ere the substance fade", which is a newspaper quote about memorial photography from the early days of its popularity. The collection contains many diverse pictures, some with subjects modified to look as if they are still alive (eyelid painting and pink cheek tinting), some without any dead subjects at all (photographs of mourners, or of cemeteries). They range from beautiful and sad photographs of parents with their dead infants to disturbing pictures of corpses with blood, evidence of malnourishment or head lesions, or even one photograph of an entire murdered family laid out in their Sunday best with head wounds in plain view. The collection also includes, not just anonymous people, but also images of famous people laid out in their coffins including Jesse James and the only surviving image of Abraham Lincoln in his coffin, saved by his secretary of War, Stanton, the same man who forbade photographs be taken during his funeral tour. The most interesting photographs to me were of a boy, dead from Scarlet Fever, photographed through a window because of quarantine, and a girl photographed 9 days after death but still remarkably well preserved.
This book was beautiful, very interesting, and highly informative. Nowadays when a loved one dies, we have photographs from their entire life to remember them by (although postmortem photography is still a small but functioning business), but these photographs come from an era where most families owned no photographs, and photographs were amazingly expensive. People may look upon postmortem photography as distasteful or `gross', but in those days, a photo of a loved one who was no longer with a family was a treasured and wonderful way to remember someone special.
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