Museums and Photography: Displaying Death

✍ Scribed by Elena Stylianou; Theopisti Stylianou-Lambert (eds.)

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 339
• Series: Routledge Research in Museum Studies
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

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.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover......Page 1
Title......Page 4
Copyright......Page 5
Contents......Page 6
List of figures......Page 9
List of contributors......Page 12
1 Approaches to Displaying Death in Museums: an Introduction......Page 18
Part I Evidencing the Past......Page 36
2 Negotiating Death at the Great Kanto Earthquake Memorial Museum......Page 38
3 Honoring the Dead: photography and the Display of the Jewish Necropolis at the Jewish Museum of Thessaloniki......Page 57
4 “Death From the Skies” Photographs in Museums of the Aerial Bombing of Civilians During World War Two......Page 79
5 Saints, Martyrs and Heroes: “Sacred Displays” or the Iconography of Death in Cypriot Museums......Page 101
Part II The Spectacle of Death......Page 128
6 The War/Photography Exhibition and the Display of Death......Page 130
7 Persons Unknown: lynching Photographs in the Museum......Page 147
8 Human Skulls and Photographs of Dead Bandits: the Problems of Presenting a Nineteenth-Century Museum to Twenty-First-Century Audiences......Page 167
9 Our First Murder: exhibiting Evidence Outside the Police Archive......Page 181
Part III Empathy and Escaping Anonymity......Page 194
10 A Gallery of Martyrs – the Martyr in the Gallery: public Display and the Artistic Appropriation of Martyr Images in the Middle East......Page 196
11 What Will You Remember When I’m Gone? Funerary Photography in the Gallery’s Public/Private Space......Page 217
12 Remediating Death at Yad Vashem’s Holocaust History Museum......Page 233
13 Photography and the Museum: visiting the Sight of Death......Page 255
Part IV Museums as Agents of Change......Page 272
14 Double Exposure: absence and Evidence in Ken Gonzales-Day’s Erased Lynching......Page 274
15 On May 1, 2011 (Alfredo Jaar, 2011)—Expanding the Frame of the Original Photograph......Page 294
16 Photography as a Form of Taxidermy: Zoe Leonard’s Preserved Head of a Bearded Woman, Musée Orfila......Page 310
Index......Page 330