Parental Grief and Photographic Remembrance

Rezensionen / Stimmen

Parents have used photographs to remember their deceased children from the 1840s to the present. This highly illustrated book uniquely traces how these remembrance photos of children are specific to their time, yet also share commonalities across time. The text draws on personal experience, wide reading, and many photographs. -- Tony Walter, Emeritus Professor of Death Studies, University of Bath, UK. Parental Grief and Photographic Remembrance is a deeply thoughtful, deeply careful, extended probe of the full swath of intimacy between photography and death. This intimacy cannot be contained within, say, the single critical trope that sees the photograph as a small premonition of everyone's death. ("He is alive and he is going to die," as Roland Barthes famously stated in Camera Lucida). Rather, Felicity Tsering Choedron Hamer connects a brilliant set of images with the stunning affect produced by the personal loss, itself, of loved ones, and traces a clear genealogy from nineteenth century pre-and-post mortem portraits to contemporary social media posts. Alert to the creative potential of photography in the work of mourning and remembrance, she expands our understanding of the photographic process and its scholarship. This is a book of many levels, all of them worthwhile. -- Laura Wexler, Professor of American Studies, Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Co-Chair of the Women's Faculty Forum, and Founder and Director of the Photographic Memory Workshop at Yale University, USA.