Dissection photography : cadavers, abjection, and the formation of identity / Brandon Zimmerman.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Zimmerman, Brandon, author.

Series:

Death and culture

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Medical photography.

Photography in education.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (xiv, 263 pages) : digital, PDF file(s).

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Bristol : Bristol University Press, 2024.

Summary:

Featuring previously unseen images, stories and anecdotes, this book explores the visual culture of death and the gross anatomy lab through the tradition of dissection photography, examining its historical aspects from both photographic and medical perspectives.

Contents:

Front Cover

Series page

Dissection Photography: Cadavers, Abjection, and the Formation of Identity

Copyright information

Dedication

Table of Contents

Series Editors' Preface

List of Figures

Note from the Publisher

Introduction: My Companions in Misery

Must be seen to be believed

Postmarked postmortems

The demise of cameras and cadavers

Hiding in plain sight

Without looking

Dissection photography: an evolving genre

1 The Stages of an Evolving Genre

Confusing conventions of counterculture

The three stages of evolution

Stage I (circa 1880-1930)

Stage II (circa 1895-1930)

Stage III (circa 1905-1925)

2 Photography Is Dead

Dead machinery

Convincing humanity

A grim reality: "the heart is not satisfied"

Life from lifelessness

3 Defining Disgust: Abjection, Photography, and the Cadaver

Exposing the cadaver: on becoming ambiguous and abject

Transcending the rot: turning ritual transgressions into transgressive rituals

An anus by any other name would still excrete: abjection and the limitations of cadaveric objectification

A proper sense of disgust

4 Is Dissection Photography Really a Genre?

Adapting to life in a moral world

What dreams may come?

5 Iconographic Ambiguities

Digging up the past: grave robbing and its relation to the origins of dissection photography

Of shutters and shuddering horror

Dissecting Black identity

6 A Necessary Inhumanity

Cruel winter: hazing rituals and the American dissecting room

Let all men be brothers

Waste not want not

Traversing the land of the dead

7 No One Ever Did: Dissection Photography and Female Identity

Always the dissected, never the dissector

It's no joke

What's in a name?

When legs and arms won.

8 Of Sharp Minds and Sharpened Tools: Dissection Photography and the Ambiguity of the Scalpel

The purity of the knife

The hand of nature

The pen is mightier than the scalpel

Adapting to the cut

The authority of the knife

Cutting up while cutting up the cadaver

Over the top, under the knife: photography's use to "appear wicked"

9 Flesh in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

Skin deep: interpreting the aesthetics of dead flesh

Imagining the unimaginable

Just merely asleep

Emulsional damage: fading in albumen and gelatin silver dissection photographs

Flesh under wraps

10 Location, Location, Location

As above so below

'Chris' Baker: the one who literally walked with death

Gone in a flash

11 Anatomical Deuteranopia

Blood culture: red is dead

Meat is murder

The problem with color: determining the race of the dead

Hueman beings

12 To Begin without Fear

A dead anything

A modern Golgotha

Cadaverse: poetry in the dissecting room

The word made flesh: dissecting table epigraphs

Religious affiliations

Not all dead

Fear of rebirth

13 The Cadaver as (Self-)Portrait

Everyone's a critic

More than mortal

The doctor and the devils

Who dissects the dissectors?

Conclusion: "Learning to Fight Death Next to Death Itself"

Acknowledgments

Notes

Introduction

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Conclusion

References

Index.

Notes:

Title from publisher's bibliographic system (viewed on 18 Dec 2024).

ISBN:

9781529222227

1529222222

9781529222197

1529222192

9781529222203

1529222206

OCLC:

1415893991