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Reviewed by:
  • Photography and Death by Audrey Linkman
  • Christopher Rovee (bio)
Photography and Death, by Audrey Linkman; pp. 214. London: Reaktion Books, 2011, £17.95, $29.95.

Among the titles included in the “Exposures” series by Reaktion Books—such as Photography and Japan (2011), Photography and Flight (2010), and Photography and Literature (2009)—Audrey Linkman’s stands out for engaging no mere theme but one of the main conceptual nodes of the medium. Photography has always been intimate with death; the post-mortem portrait, whose Victorian conventions Linkman describes in fascinating detail, can be said to exemplify the condition of all photographs. As Roland Barthes writes in Camera Lucida (1981), every photograph is simultaneously postmortem and pre-mortem: “that is dead and that is going to die” ([Hill and Wang], 96). Generalizing the observation, Barthes comes to understand a childhood photograph of his mother (the elusive Winter Garden photograph) as a profound “defeat of time,” which leads him to wonder, “why is it that I am alive here and now?” (84).

Photography and Death offers a lucid and often arresting account of the history, materials, and practices that undergird this prominent conceptual affiliation. Filled with breathtaking details and beautifully reproduced nineteenth-century images, Linkman unfolds in exhaustive (but never exhausting) detail the material relationship that took hold in photographic practice almost immediately after the emergence of the technology in 1839. The need to remember those who have passed away, often the young (in an age of high childhood mortality), is described in moving prose that avoids becoming overly sentimental. Linkman’s materials are invariably surprising, even to scholars—for example, a haunting portrait (circa 1860) of the straw hat of a London boy who had died just before his fifth birthday. Linkman gives a history to subjects that scholars often take for granted, such as the illusive proximity between sleep and death in mid-nineteenth-century post-mortem photographs, or the practice of photographing the dead as if they were alive. In addition to meticulously describing the sitting practices and production processes relevant to such phenomena, her account is supported by illustrations, including an 1845 daguerreotype of a widower from the Eastern seaboard, clasping his dead wife in a conventional studio pose, a Bible resting on his lap; and an overpainted salt print (1854) of a deceased Viennese doctor propped up in his reading chair, fully dressed and eyes open, his lids having been peeled open with the handle of a teaspoon.

Photography and Death doesn’t so much express an argument as offer a subject heading for its materials. (Linkman is a museum curator, and the book’s presentation of materials has a museum-like quality about it.) The bulk of the first chapter sets European and North American post-mortem imagery in a wider context of death practices, ending with some of the twentieth-century transformations in death photography wrought by new media, including the vogue for posting photographs of the dead on social networking and other sites. This is fascinating material, though one wishes for a more theoretically nuanced way of understanding such complex phenomena.

Chapter 2 shifts to the act of mourning. The range of subjects covered, and the attention Linkman devotes to minute distinctions between them, is impressive. Memorial photographs, funeral group portraits, photographs of public mourning (including the funeral processions of Abraham Lincoln and Jefferson Davis), and monuments and gravestones, some decorated with photographs of the dead, all receive [End Page 349] copious individual treatment. Linkman’s text is filled with appealingly strange and detailed descriptions of issues ranging from the way in which coffins came to be present at photographers’ studios in nineteenth-century America to photography’s importance to the design of the AIDS quilt. The third chapter, “Exhibiting the Dead,” moves away from the nineteenth century, touching on early discussions of art-photography in order to launch a discussion of recent (post-1970, for the most part) visual work in which death is either the direct subject or thematically central to the composition. This chapter, while compelling, wanders more than the preceding ones. The difference between art photograph and mourning photograph breaks down somewhat, raising interesting questions about the photography of...

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