Recently, we had a research request about a "death portrait" someone had of an ancestor. This one was described as a charcoal drawing of the deceased in his coffin. The same week, I watched a fascinating documentary on PBS about the plot to steal Abraham Lincoln's body after he was assassinated. An important thing that I learned from this program was that photography of President Lincoln in situ was strictly forbidden, but that one photographer was secretly able to do it from a distance and - even more amazingly - the photograph was able to survive. The photographer produced the incredible image you can see and read about
here.
Another thing that interested me from this documentary was that one of the speakers was from the Museum of Funeral Customs (read more about this
here). It interests me greatly that death and mourning are bona fide areas of research and study - it is a field I have a secondary interest in.
This all made me think about ways we support research in this field in our library.
Our museum has a number of objects related to death and mourning: African coffins, Australian Aboriginal Pukamani poles, paintings and works on paper depicting deaths or burials, Chinese death masks, Egyptian funerary portraits, depictions of "Death" (personified) in the works of Durer, Goya and others. Rites and practices undertaken around death and dying really are incredible insights into social aspects of a particular culture.
You're probably noticing that the way I'm speaking about this here sounds like I'm positioning artifacts or depictions of death rites in the museum context as something merely historical or of "other" cultures. Maybe it's because of my WASP-y upbringing, but I'm sure I saw death-rites-on-display as only artifacts of cultures other than my own until I reached college and began taking art history classes. I think others might think this way as well.
In addition to the types of objects mentioned above, the museum library has resources that enlighten and help us understand
American practices. Reading these provided an incredible insight into the death customs of my own culture. Here are some examples*:
Library of Dust by photographer David Maisel (San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books, 2008)
Photographer David Maisel has created a somber and beautiful series of images depicting canisters containing the cremated remains of the unclaimed dead from an Oregon psychiatric hospital.
Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America (Altadena, CA: Twelvetrees Press, 1990)
and Sleeping Beauty II: Grief, Bereavement and the Family in Memorial Photography (New York: Burns Archive Press, 2002) by Stanley B. Burns
Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America is a selection of American postmortem memorial photography listed in chronological order from 1840 to 1930 from the Burns Archive. It includes essays on death in America, as well as a bibliography. It is a fascinating book for anyone interested in early photography, 19th century history or ever-changing American attitudes toward death and dying.
Puritan Gravestone Art (Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife; Boston: Boston University, 1977)
andPuritan Gravestone Art II (Dublin Seminar for New England Folklife; Boston: Boston University, 1978) by Peter Benes
These books, part of the Dublin Seminar on New England Folklife at Boston University, include essays on a wide variety of aspects of stone carving, stone carvers, iconography, traditions, and more.
From Slate to Marble: Gravestone Carving Traditions in Eastern Massachusetts, 1770-1870 (Evanston, IL: Graver Press, 2007) by James Blachowicz
From Slate to Marble is a definitive and exhaustive study of 55 gravestone carvers who worked in and around eastern Massachusetts. It is sumptuously illustrated in duotone and monochrome. It includes a CD containing over 750 images of gravestones with a list of 8000 gravestones and a catalog of 713 burial grounds.
Pioneer Cemeteries: Sculpture Gardens of the Old West (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2008) by Annette Stott
Stott shows how people from Asia, Europe, and the Americas contributed to the visual character of the [Rocky Mountain] cemeteries, and how the sepulchral garden functioned as an open-air gallery of public sculpture, at once a site for relaxation, learning, and social ritual. Here, widespread participation in a variety of ceremonies brought mountain communities together with a frequency almost unimaginable today.**
And, importantly, resources related to Native American death, dying, burial and remains (a very timely and critical topic; again, a sampling):
Repatriation Reader: Who Owns American Indian Remains? (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2000) by Devon Mihesuah
Implementing the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (Washington, DC: American Association of Museums, 2001) by Roxana Adams
To continue to promote scholarship and research, the
Constructions of Death, Mourning, and Memory Conference was organized by the Women Art Patrons and Collectors Conferences organization. I believe this conference continues to this day.
(Addendum 5/03/09)
NPR just featured this book -
Dissection: Photographs of a Rite of Passage in American Medicine 1880-1930 - in one of their shows. See
here for more details. Interesting!
*All abstract and review material taken from other sources (Amazon.com, Alibris, publishers, etc.)
** I had the extreme pleasure of being given cemetery tours of the Riverside Cemetery and the Fairmount Cemetery in Denver by Ms. Stott. The experiences were truly memorable.