Contemporary audiences are often shocked to learn that in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, medical students around the world posed for photographic portraits with their cadavers; a genre known as dissection photography.
Featuring previously unseen images, stories and anecdotes, this book explores the visual culture of death within the gross anatomy lab through the tradition of dissection photography, examining its historical aspects from both photographic and medical perspectives.
The author pays particular attention to the use of dissection photographs as an expression of student identity, and as an evolving transgressive ritual intricately connected to, and eventually superseding, the act of dissection itself.
By:
Brandon Zimmerman (Exhibit Developer Designer Curator and Consultant)
Imprint: Bristol University Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 234mm,
Width: 156mm,
ISBN: 9781529222180
ISBN 10: 1529222184
Series: Death and Culture
Pages: 278
Publication Date: 01 March 2024
Audience:
Professional and scholarly
,
General/trade
,
Undergraduate
,
ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
Introduction: My Companions in Misery 1. The Stages of an Evolving Genre 2. Photography Is Dead 3. Defining Disgust: Abjection, Photography, and the Cadaver 4. Is Dissection Photography Really a Genre? 5. Iconographic Ambiguities 6. A Necessary Inhumanity 7. No One Ever Did: Dissection Photography and Female Identity 8. Of Sharp Minds and Sharpened Tools: Dissection Photography and the Ambiguity of the Scalpel 9. Flesh in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction 10. Location, Location, Location 11. Anatomical Deuteranopia 12. To Begin without Fear 13. The Cadaver as (Self-)Portrait Conclusion: “Learning to Fight Death Next to Death Itself”
Brandon Zimmerman has worked as an exhibit developer, designer, curator, and consultant for numerous museums, libraries, and archives throughout the United States for 20 years. He holds an MA in Photographic Preservation and Collections Management from the University of Rochester.
