Photography and Death by Audrey Linkman (review)

Books confronting the subject of death still find significant obstacles obtaining a publisher and a reading audience, despite the view of British sociologist Tony Walter that the twentieth century taboo in western countries regarding death has ended. Perhaps, then, it is no surprise that Audrey Linkman’s Photography and Death appears as part of a British series of books tying photography to various subjects versus being a stand-alone title. Of course, the challenge remains for the writer to situate the book for historical interest or trade market curiosity. The numerous images alone may be intended to supply this interest. Indeed, they are powerful.

For a reader, though, a book attempting to link photography to death may seem to do too much and at the same time too little. Certainly, Linkman demonstrates considerable expertise concerning the technology of the photographic process and its impact on commercial portraiture. This aspect of her narrative, however, does not figure in the book’s organization or prominently in its index while those unfamiliar with the development of photography need such grounding. The book only contains three chapters, about photographing, mourning, and exhibiting the dead, which chronologically overlap rather than represent any strict progression. The reader’s sense of history can get lost in the dozens of provocative photographs that serve to illustrate the varying purposes or values expressed by taking portraits of those expiring from natural causes. In fact, the last chapter practically transforms the book into a study of artistic photography and dying; Linkman discusses and includes images of a dying body—from an illness like AIDS—rather than focusing solely on post-mortem works.

Nonetheless, the history of commercial photography plays an important role regarding the content and setting for photographing the dead. As studios began to appear in the mid-nineteenth century, photos of the dead tended to be commissioned by the bereaved, as a replacement for post-mortem masks or paintings from memory or to provide a likeness for memory cards or other memento mori distributed to family and friends. Such remembrances provided comfort by depicting the dead as peaceful, sometimes delicate, but typically devout and often seeming asleep. The living figures photographed with the dead rarely betray emotion, which photographs thought marred the illusion of placidity or slumber. As the process changed, photographers could take images in a client’s home, but by the early twentieth century the task became that of merely saving the so-called “memory picture” produced at a commercial funeral home. Photography had become more mainstream by then, enabling pictures more often taken in life to be used in memorial cards, family albums and ultimately on cemetery masonry. Indeed, as snapshots became ubiquitous after 1945, such photograph need not originate from a portrait studio.

Often Linkman’s book offers captivating, if not compelling, details about social practices related to death; for example, in Roman Catholic Mexico and Italy “no one was permitted to weep over the death of a child” because, to the devout, this grief insulted God (39). Such intriguing insights occasionally stray to the margins or even beyond strictly western experience. Unfortunately, such information rarely becomes an occasion for sustained discussion or analysis. The most remarkable, provocative portrait to me (and to students who saw me reading the book), called Husband Supporting Dead Wife (c. 1845), features a rare Victorian gesture of the husband steadying his seemingly Bible-clutching, empty-eyed dead wife with his left arm around her. The author, however, provides little information about this couple, beyond the photograph being from Pennsylvania or New Jersey. The historian who can identify them and the circumstances surrounding this photograph will obtain my full attention.

Linkman’s organization and emphasis on a descriptive narrative detracts from the potential to offer a complication or a serious challenge to the modern understanding of death as the great taboo of the twentieth century, the theory of Geoffrey Gorer and Philippe Ariès. Linkman tends to echo the contentions of Gorer and Ariès, yet she also locates the professionalized funeral...