Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America

by Jay Ruby

Book Overview

Secure the Shadowuses 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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0262681099
• ISBN13: 9780262681094
• Release Date: July 1999
• Publisher: MIT Press (MA)
• Length: 232 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 7.6" x 9.7"

Customer Reviews

Secure the Shadow

I am not sure what came first---my love of history or my love of photography but they merged together 40 years ago when I cared for high-risk infants. Part of my job was consoling parents at the loss of their child and part of that job was photographing the family....to provide proof for this fleeting moment. Life is commemorated through photographs---why not death? This book examines images of the dying and death and gives us a complete history of mourning customs in America from these paintings, photographs, tombstones, funeral cards, and newspapers. The only topic left out is mourning jewelry, dress, and tear bottles. A great book for the beginner who wants to study the Victorian time period and very useful for social workers, historians of photography, and health care professionals who work with death and mourning.

Fascinating!

If you saw the wonderful film "The Others" you were doubtlessly exposed to one of those gloriously macabre Victorian traditions: the Mortuary Photograph. Yes, those images featured in that splendid little "Book Of The Dead" were real images of deceased individuals taken in the 19th century by bereaved relatives. The images in the film were from the collection of Stanley Burns, whose long out-of-print collection, Sleeping Beauty (and its recently re-issued sister Sleeping Beauty II), is considered the masterpiece of Mortuary Photography. However, if you can't seem to locate a copy of Sleeping Beauty, there is an alternative: Jay Ruby's Secure The Shadow. This excellent book may not pack the same photographic punch as Sleeping Beauty but the excellent text makes up for it. For many people in current times, the idea of photographing corpses and displaying them around the house seems unbearably morbid. However, Ruby does a good job of explaining the underlying philosophies of the time that made mortuary photography so popular. He uses newspaper clippings, old funerary photography advertisements, letters, and photographer's account books to explain the how the connection between photography and death developed and continues to this day, in a somewhat altered form. This book has made me want to start perusing Ebay on a regular basis looking for vintage mortuary pics. It's a tremendous hobby, really - and this is a very good book!

Secure the shadow, Ere the substance fade, Let nature imitate what nature made.

This quote was an early photography advertising slogan and is the thesis sentence for this outstanding analysis. Not as assuming or stylized as Sleeping Beauty, it has a wonderful perspective. I just love it. Makes you wish other authors would persue the subject. Having worked in the death care industry, and I think folks are just too removed from death. We are born ,live and die..and how we feel about death should be as contemplated as birth. This book allows us to do this, if you were raised removed from death, this book as well as Sleeping Beauty I & II are a good place to start feeling more comfortable with death as part of life.

great book for those interested in memorial portraiture!

this book not only provides information on post- mortem memorial photography,but early paintings as well.makes an excellent edition to sleeping beauty 1 & 2,as they do not cover paintings.take it from a long time hard core collector of this subject matter,sleeping beauty 1 and 2,and secure the shadow.great conceptual text as well.this is not only a book with pictures of dead people.all photos are blk & white,but there are a good number of realy fine ones.if you are interested in the subject or a collector,get it!

Chilling

It's unfathomable to me how a young mother could pose for hours in front of a camera holding her dead child. Equally disturbing is the image of one's mantle strewn with photographs of the dearly departed in all their slack-jawed, glaze-eyed post-mortal glory. Nevertheless, this was the custom during the turn of the century, a time when those who could not afford photography in life secured in death. Photographing the deceased was an integral part of the grieving process and, especially in the case of children, often the only proof one had of ever existing. The delicate antique photos reproduced in this book are disturbing, sad and lovely, in that order. Customs may have changed--I don't suppose many of us carry snapshots from our grandparent's graves--but reverence for the dead is still evident in more recent pictures of modern, frilly, floral funeral decorations. Secure the Shadow is a well-researched, stunning volume of great interest to social historians, the morbidly obsessed, and the just plain curious.