1st Edition

Museums and Photography Displaying Death

    340 Pages
    by Routledge

    338 Pages
    by Routledge

    Museums and Photography combines a strong theoretical approach with international case studies to investigate the display of death in various types of museums—history, anthropology, art, ethnographic, and science museums – and to understand the changing role of photography in museums.  Contributors explore the politics and poetics of displaying death, and more specifically, the role of photography in representing and interpreting this difficult topic. Working with nearly 20 researchers from different cultural backgrounds and disciplines, the editors critically engage the recent debate on the changing role of museums, exhibition meaning-making, and the nature of photography. They offer new ways for understanding representational practices in relation to contemporary visual culture. This book will appeal to researchers and museum professionals, inspiring new thinking about death and the role of photography in making sense of it.

    Approaches to Displaying Death in Museums: An Introduction
    Elena Stylianou & Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert

    PART I: EVIDENCING THE PAST
    Negotiating Death at the Great Kanto Earthquake Memorial Museum
    J. M. Hammond

    Honoring the dead: photography and the display of the Jewish Necropolis at the Jewish
    Museum of Thessaloniki
    Iro Katsaridou

    “Death from the skies.” Photographs in museums of the aerial bombing of civilians during World War Two
    Sheila Watson

    Saints, Martyrs and Heroes: “Sacred Displays” or the Iconography of Death in Cypriot Museums
    Yiannis Toumazis

    PART II: THE SPECTABLE OF DEATH
    The War/Photography Exhibition and the Display of Death
    Jean Kempf

    “Persons Unknown”: Lynching Photographs in the Museum
    RM Wolff

    Human Skulls and Photographs of Dead Bandits: the Problems of Presenting a Nineteenth Century Museum to Twenty-First-Century-Audiences
    Silvano Montaldo and Eleanor Chiari

    Our First Murder: Exhibiting Evidence outside the Police Archive
    Stella Pekiaridi

    PART III: EMPAPHY AND RESTORING ANONYMITY
    A Gallery of Martyrs – The Martyr in the Gallery: Public Display and the Artistic Appropriation of Martyr Images in the Middle East
    Verena Straub

    What Will You Remember When I’m Gone? Funerary Photography in the Gallery’s Public / Private Space
    Rosanne Altstatt

    Remediating Death at Yad Vashem’s Holocaust History Museum
    Rachel Perry

    Photography and the Museum: visiting the sight of Death
    Pam Meecham

    PART IV: MUSEUMS AS AGENTS OF CHANGE
    Double Exposure: Absence and Evidence in Ken Gonzales-Day’s Erased Lynching
    Reilley Bishop-Stall

    On May 1, 2011 (Alfredo Jaar, 2011) – Expanding the Frame of the Original Photograph
    Mafalda Dâmaso

    Photography as a form of taxidermy: Zoe Leonard’s Preserved Head of a Bearded Woman, Musée Orfila
    Chelsea Nichols

    Biography

    Elena Stylianou is Assistant Professor in Art History and Theory at European University Cyprus and the founder and coordinator of its Cultural Studies and Contemporary Arts Lab. She has taught in well-known museums in New York, such as the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Museum of the City of New York and has been involved in various curatorial projects. She has received several fellowships and awards, including a Fulbright Scholarship (USA) and an Art Table Museum Fellowship (USA).

    Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert is Assistant Professor at the School of Fine and Applied Arts at the Cyprus University of Technology and the founder and coordinator of its Visual Sociology and Museum Studies Lab. Her previous books include The Political Museum (2016), Museums and Visitor Photography (2016) and Photography and Cyprus (2014). She has received several scholarships and awards, including a Smithsonian Fellowship in Museum Practice (USA) and a Fulbright Fellowship (USA).

    "In essence, the images of death in a museum context question the communicative capacity and constraints of photography and the role of museums in elucidating the human condition. This book will likely stimulate some new thinking about death and its multi-layered meanings that define who we are."Vivian Ting Wing Yan, The Academy of Visual Arts, Hong Kong