Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America. (book reviews)

Secure the shadow examines the social role of death-related photography in the United States from 1840 to the present. The basic argument is simple enough: that attitudes to death photographs themselves reflect attitudes to death. However, to this simple premiss Ruby has brought photographic history and visual anthropology together in an admirably researched study of production and consumption of personal vernacular images of the deceased and death rituals within the context of changing attitudes.

Postmortem imagery is traced from its roots in naive painting, through the photographic ...

Read the rest of this article with a Free Trial at HighBeam Research.