Empty hands and precious pictures: post-mortem portrait photographs of children

In an 1882 article on ‘A Grave Subject’, the photographer George Bradforde wrote: How the relatives can bear to look upon these photographs I cannot understand, unless they have a peculiar love of the horrible. For my part I cannot see the necessity of photographing the dead at all. If the departed were truly beloved, nothing that may happen in this world can ever efface the dear features from the mind’s eye: it needs not a cold, crude photograph representing the last dreary stage of humanity to recall those lineaments. Indeed, I should imagine it would in time lead to the forgetting of the pleasant smile or the lightsome laugh, and supply, in place, a ghoul-like resemblance of anything but a pleasant nature (394- 5). This sums up the reasons why photographic portraits of the dead are no longer widespread. Such images would today be viewed as ghoulish and morbid, and a photograph of a dead body now strikes us as bearable only in the form of news images in which horror is the main thrust of the story. Such pictures bear witness to the obscenity of violent death: they are a necessary record of atrocity rather than the portrait of a dead person. Victorian photographs of the dead, however, were for the most part not those of murders or victims of war; they were family members, most commonly children, who had died at home. They are not news photographs distributed widely among strangers, but portraits, commissioned by family members and kept in the home

Julia Margaret Cameron\u27s Photographs as Paintings

This paper argues that in order to better understand the photographic techniques, and compositional choices employed by Julia Margaret Cameron, one must analyze them in terms of the language of paintings. By using photography to stage painterly tableaus, Cameron blurred reality and fiction, the result of which is the equalization of all those she photographed, be they famed Victorian poets or female maids

Ida M. Folsom Correspondence

Entries include a typed biography, handwritten letters on plain paper and personal stationery, a photographic portrait, photographs of Folsom\u27s birthplace and her home in 1929, a book jacket cover and flap, and typed transcripts of book inscriptions

UA1C11/57 College of Nursing Photo Collection

Photographs of College of Nursing graduates

A View From Inside

With A View from Inside Alexa Wright is challenging our preconceptions of what constitutes reality. The ten portrait photographs in the book draw on the principals of eighteenth century portrait painting to give form to the unique realities encountered by different people during psychotic episodes. The accompanying narratives offer a vivid first-hand in,sight into the experiences of the people portrayed