It may seem ironic, but whether you’re saying goodbye to a celebrity or to a member of your own family, being present for the funeral is one of the best ways to begin the healing process through mourning. It can serve as a way for family and friends to find closure. Many celebrities (or their family members) have chosen to have open casket funerals for reasons that are often unknown. Some may do it as a way to say goodbye to fans, while others may have wanted to make a final statement, even after they’d passed. This list of celebrity open casket funerals is not for the faint of heart, but these final images - and the stories behind them - are often important to remember.
Even if you simply came to this list to learn more about the final moments of your favorite celeb, you may find a bit of closure as well, but keep in mind that photos of dead bodies are sometimes difficult to see.
In 1973, Lee died of cerebral edema after completing his final film, Enter the Dragon,in Hong Kong. Before he was flown back to Seattle to be buried, a public mourning was held for his fans, and close to 20,000 people attended a public viewing of his body.
Bruce Lee was a Hong Kong American martial artist, Hong Kong action film actor, martial arts instructor, philosopher, filmmaker, and the founder of Jeet Kune Do. Lee was the son of Cantonese opera star Lee Hoi-Chuen. He is widely considered by commentators, critics, media and other martial artists to be one of the most influential martial artists of all time, and a pop culture icon of the 20th century. He is often credited with helping to change the way Asians were presented in American films. Lee was born in Chinatown, San Francisco on November 27, 1940 to parents from Hong Kong and was raised in Kowloon with his family until his late teens. He was introduced to the film industry by his ..more on Wikipedia
Zawgyi one keyboard for windows 10. 200 100% Leading this Week Pts Helpful 1. Leader Board Leading Today Pts Helpful 1.
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see more on Bruce LeeAfter the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., his body was laid in an open casket in Atlanta on April 9, where over 1,000 mourners came to pay their respects to the civil rights leader. While the body lay in state in Memphis days earlier, the wound in King's neck was still visible, and many mourners reportedly kissed and touched King's face.
Martin Luther King Jr. (born Michael King Jr., January 15, 1929 – April 4, 1968) was an American Baptist minister and activist who was a leader in the Civil Rights Movement. He is best known for his role in the advancement of civil rights using nonviolent civil disobedience based on his Christian beliefs. King became a civil rights activist early in his career. He led the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott and helped found the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) in 1957, serving as its first president. With the SCLC, King led an unsuccessful 1962 struggle against segregation in Albany, Georgia, and helped organize the 1963 nonviolent protests in Birmingham, Alabama. King also helped to ..more on Wikipedia
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see more on Martin Luther King, Jr.In 2006, a number of celebrities, including Michael Jackson, paid their respects to James Brown at his funeral. Jackson was just one of the thousands who gathered around Brown's 24-karat gold coffin.
James Joseph Brown (May 3, 1933 – December 25, 2006) was an American singer-songwriter, dancer, musician, record producer and bandleader. A progenitor of funk music and a major figure of 20th-century music and dance, he is often referred to as the 'Godfather of Soul.' In a career that lasted 50 years, he influenced the development of several music genres. ..more on Wikipedia
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see more on James BrownAfter suffering a cerebral hemorrhage while driving through the hills of Monaco, Grace Kelly died in a car crash and was committed to her final resting placein the Grimaldi family vault. Kelly, also known as Princess Grace of Monaco, drew film stars and royalty to her funeral in Monaco's St. Nicholas Cathedral.
Grace Patricia Kelly was an American actress who, after marrying Prince Rainier III, became Princess of Monaco. After embarking on an acting career in 1950, at the age of 20, Kelly appeared in New York City theatrical productions and more than 40 episodes of live drama productions broadcast during the early 1950s Golden Age of Television. In October 1953, she gained stardom from her performance in the film Mogambo. It won her a Golden Globe Award and an Academy Award nomination in 1954. She had leading roles in five films, including The Country Girl, for which her deglamorized performance earned her an Academy Award for Best Actress. ..more on Wikipedia
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see more on Grace KellyNearly ten months after Nazi Germany announced its complete surrender to Allied forces, which officially marked the end of World War II, the fate of the remaining Nazi officials was finally determined. The Nuremburg Trials brought 10 of the highest ranking Nazi party members to justice for 'crimes against peace, crimes of war, and crimes against humanity' that they committed throughout the duration of WWII. On October 1, 1946, a total of 12 Nazi leaders were condemned to death by hanging. Two of the 12 actually managed to escape this fate - one died by suicide and the other died while trying to run away.
Because the impact of the Nazi regime had shaken the world, people wanted to make sure they documented the deaths of any Nazi party members that they could through pictures. In addition to the executed convicted Nazis, soldiers took photos of the bodies of Nazi leaders whenever they could. Adolf Hitler himself was photographed after his suicide. Compiled below are all the Nazi corpse photos you can find. Check them out to bear witness to the end of a horrifying, genocidal regime.
Died: April 30, 1945
Cause Of Death: Suicide by Cyanide and Gunshot
Place Of Death: Berlin, Germany
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![Death Death](https://i.ytimg.com/vi/EB7KDipRLlQ/maxresdefault.jpg)
#66 on The Most Important Leaders in World History
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#36 on The Most Important Military Leaders in World History
see more on Adolf HitlerDied: December 1, 1945
Cause Of Death: Execution by 12-person firing squad
Place Of Death: Aversa, Italy
Died: October 16, 1946
Cause Of Death: Capital punishment, Hanging
Place Of Death: Nuremberg, Germany
see more on Wilhelm KeitelDied: May 23, 1945
Cause Of Death: Suicide by cyanide capsule
Place Of Death: Lüneburg, Germany
see more on Heinrich HimmlerPictures and videos of Prince in the days before he died were released by Minnesota police and prosecutors Thursday, hours after authorities announced that no criminal charges would be filed against anyone in connection with the singer's accidental opioid overdose.
![After After](https://static.independent.co.uk/s3fs-public/styles/article_small/public/thumbnails/image/2017/11/08/14/istock-511436121.jpg)
With the end of the investigation came the publication of a huge stash of documents, pictures and videos,10 gigabytes of which posted to the website of the Carver County Sheriff's Office. Kp system astrology basic.
READ MORE: Prince's laptop, diet, weight loss and distress highlight captivating police documents
Prince was 57 when he was found alone and unresponsive in an elevator at his Paisley Park studio compound on April 21, 2016. His death sparked a national outpouring of grief and prompted a joint investigation by Carver County and federal authorities to find out how and why he had died.
An autopsy found he died of an accidental overdose of fentanyl, a synthetic opioid 50 times more powerful than heroin. But Carver County Attorney Mark Metz said Thursday that Prince thought he was taking a common painkiller, Vicodin, but instead was taking counterfeit Vicodin laced with fentanyl.
Metz said it remains a mystery how Prince obtained the deadly pills he was taking or from whom, and there was not enough evidence to prosecute anyone for a crime in connection with his death.
The pictures and videos of Prince and the inside of Paisley Park on the day he was found dead do not provide any insight to those questions, either.
One photo shows Prince on April 20, 2016, the day before his death at the office of Dr. Michael Todd Schulenberg, the local family physician who had been treating him after being referred by his patient, Kirk Johnson, one of Prince's oldest friends and top aide.
On Thursday, Schulenberg agreed to pay $30,000 to settle a federal civil claim for knowingly writing a prescription in someone else's name (Johnson's), which violates the Controlled Substances Act.
Several other images show the music superstar’s body on the floor of his Paisley Park estate, near an elevator. He is on his back, eyes closed with his head still partly in the elevator. His right hand is on his stomach and left arm on the floor.
The documents include interviews with Prince’s inner circle, including Johnson, his bodyguard and estate manager, who told investigators that he had noticed Prince “looking just a little frail.” He said did not realize his boss had an opioid addiction until he passed out on a plane a week before he died.
“It started to all making sense, though, just his behavior sometimes and change of mood and I’m like oh this is what, I think this is what’s going on, that’s why I took the initiative and said let’s go to my doctor because you haven’t been to the doctor, let’s check it all out,” Johnson said, according to a transcript of an interview with investigators.
A paramedic told a police detective that after the second shot of naloxone, Prince “took a large gasp and woke up,” according to the investigative documents. He said the singer told paramedics, “I feel all fuzzy.”
A nurse at the hospital where Prince was taken for monitoring told detectives that he refused routine overdose testing that would have included blood and urine tests. When asked what he had taken, he didn’t say what it was, but that “someone gave it to him to relax.” Other documents say Prince said he took one or two pills.
Days later, Johnson took Prince to see Schulenberg for flu symptoms. The doctor ran some tests and prescribed other medications to help him. A urinalysis came back positive for opioids. At that point, his team contacted California-based addiction specialist Howard Kornfeld, who dispatched his son Andrew to Minnesota. He was among those who found the singer's body on the morning of April 21.
Kornfeld told investigators that Prince was still warm to the touch when he was found, but that rigor mortis had begun to set in.
The documents also show that Prince’s closest confidants knew he was a private person and tried to respect that, with Johnson saying: “That’s what (angers me) cause it’s like, man, how did he hide this so well?”
Johnson said after that episode, Prince canceled some concerts as friends urged him to rest. Johnson also said that Prince “said he wanted to talk to somebody” about his addiction.
One of Prince’s sisters took to Twitter Friday, expressing disappointment about the way the death investigation was handled. Sharon L. Nelson tweeted: “There is so much about Prince’s death and this investigation that troubles me and millions of #prince fans around the world.”
In another tweet, she references an article noting that Prince’s computer wasn’t searched immediately, saying “This was disappointing and hurtful. Let’s hope the Federal Gov’t does better.”
Contributing: The Associated Press
Post-mortem photography (also known as memorial portraiture or a mourning portrait) is the practice of photographing the recently deceased. Various cultures use and have used this practice, though the best-studied area of post-mortem photography is that of Europe and America.[1] There can be considerable dispute as to whether individual early photographs actually show a dead person or not, often sharpened by commercial considerations.
The form continued the tradition of earlier painted mourning portraits. Today post-mortem photography is most common in the contexts of police and pathology work.
- 3In other cultures
History and popularity[edit]
The invention of the daguerreotype in 1839 made portraiture much more commonplace, as many of those who were unable to afford the commission of a painted portrait could afford to sit for a photography session.[2] This cheaper and quicker method also provided the middle class with a means for memorializing dead loved ones.
Post-mortem photography was very common in the nineteenth century when 'death occurred in the home and was quite an ordinary part of life.'[3] As photography was a new medium, it is plausible that 'many daguerreotype post-mortem portraits, especially those of infants and young children, were probably the only photographs ever made of the sitters. The long exposure time made deceased subjects easy to photograph.'[3] (The problem of long exposure times also led to the phenomenon of hidden mother photography, where the mother was hidden in-frame to calm a young child and keep them still.[4]) According to Mary Warner Marien, 'post-mortem photography flourished in photography's early decades, among clients who preferred to capture an image of a deceased loved one rather than have no photograph at all.'[5]
These photographs served as keepsakes to remember the deceased. The later invention of the carte de visite, which allowed multiple prints to be made from a single negative, meant that copies of the image could be mailed to relatives. Approaching the 20th century, cameras became more accessible and more people began to be able to take photographs for themselves.
In America, post-mortem photography became an increasingly private practice by the mid-to-late nineteenth century, with discussion moving out of trade journals and public discussion.[6] The now more private practice was studied by anthropologist Jay Ruby who was able to find limited information after the turn of the century, but noted a resurgence in the so-called 'mourning tableaux' - where the living were photographed surrounding the coffin of the deceased, sometimes with the deceased visible - in America in the 1930s.[6] He was also able to find examples of death photography as a private practice in America his own time - the 1960s.[7] Barbara Norfleet investigated further and discovered the practice of post-mortem photography continued in America right up until World War II 'at least among rural and urban working-and middle-class families [in ethnic minorities].'[1] Her conclusion centred on the work of African-American portrait photographer James Van Der Zee in Harlem from 1917-1940s, whose Harlem Book of the Dead is a collection post-mortem portraits of other African Americans in Harlem over the course of his career.[8]
In Britain, Audrey Linkman found a similar continuation of post-mortem photography in the inter-war years, indicating the practice was not limited to the Victorian Era in Britain, though she said little about wider Europe.[9] She also was a strong supporter of Barbara Norfleet's research into the ethnic minorities and middle-classes of America, insisting that post-mortem photography remained popular among these groups for far longer than the upper classes who had previously been studied.[9]
Post-mortem photography as early as the 1970s was taken up by artists, and continues today. Audrey Linkman,[9] Christopher Townsend[10] and Lauren Summersgill[11] have all researched this particular area of study. Artists include Jeffrey Silverthorne, Hans Danuser, Hannah Wilke, Nick Wapping, British photographer Sue Fox, Nan Golden, and Andres Serrano's series The Morgue. Summersgill argues that artists in America in the 1990s used post-mortem photography to fight against the increasing medicalisation of death.[12]
Personal post-mortem photography is considered to be largely private, with the exception of the public circulation of stillborn children in the charity website Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep[13] and the controversial rise of funeral selfies on phones.[14]
Evolving style[edit]
Jay Ruby’s analysis of various styles in post-mortem photography – particularly the poses of the deceased – argued that key poses reflected cultural attitudes toward death.[6][10] Ruby argued for the dominance of the ‘Last Sleep’ pose in the first forty years of post-mortem portraiture. In the ‘Last Sleep’ the deceased’s eyes are closed and they lay as though in repose, which Ruby argued reflected the American desire to associate death with sleep.[6]
Another popular arrangement was to have the deceased presented seated in a chair or arranged in a portrait to mimic life because these photographs would serve as their last social presence.[15] In the Victorian era it was not uncommon to photograph deceased young children or newborns in the arms of their mother. The inclusion of the mother, it has been argued, encourages one to see through the mother's eyes: 'The desire to see through the mother’s eyes, and even identify with such pain would have been more potent at the time, when the daguerreotype would be shown to friends and family who might have known the child and certainly knew the family.'[16]
While some images (especially tintypes and ambrotypes) have a rosy tint added to the cheeks of the corpse, it is untrue that metal stands and other devices were used to pose the dead as though they were living.[17]The use by photographers of a stand or arm rest (sometimes referred to as a Brady stand), which aided living persons to remain still long enough for the camera's lengthy exposure time, has given rise to this myth. While 19th-century people may have wished their loved ones to look their best in a memorial photograph, evidence of a metal stand should be understood as proof that the subject was a living person.[17]
Later photographic examples show the subject in a coffin. Some very late examples show the deceased in a coffin with a large group of funeral attendees; this type of photograph was especially popular in Europe and less common in the United States.[9]
As noted above, post-mortem photography is still practised and is common in America among women who experienced stillbirth; commemorated on websites such as 'Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep'.[18] This style of mother holding child was also common in the Victorian era when death of infants was common.[7] Photographs, especially depicting persons who were considered to be very holy lying in their coffins, are still circulated among faithful Eastern Catholic, Eastern Orthodox and Oriental Orthodox Christians.[19]
In other cultures[edit]
Iceland[edit]
It is believed that the post-mortem photography died out in the Nordic countries around 1940. When examining Iceland's culture surrounding death, it is concluded that the nation held death as an important and significant companion.[20] Throughout much of the nineteenth century, the country's infant mortality rate was higher than the rest of European countries. Consequently, death was a public topic that was considerably seen through Icelanders' religious lenses. There are many that believe Iceland's attitudes about post-mortem photography can be drawn out from its earlier attitudes about death. In the early 1900s, it wasn't uncommon to read a local newspaper's obituary section and find detailed information regarding an individual's death, including instances where suicide occurred. How post-mortem photography began in Iceland remains uncertain, but these photographs can be traced to the late nineteenth century.
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland[edit]
Post-mortem photography was particularly popular in Victorian Britain.[21] From 1860-1910, these Post-mortem portraits were much like American portraits in style, focusing on the deceased either displayed as asleep or with the family; often these images were placed in family albums.[22] The study has often been mixed with American traditions, because the two are so similar.[9][10][2][11]
See also[edit]
References[edit]
- ^ abNorfleet, Barbara (1993). Looking at Death. Boston, MA: David R. Godine. p. 13.
- ^ abBunge, J.A., & Mord, J. (2015). Beyond the dark veil: Post-mortem & mourning photography from the Thanatos archive. San Francisco, CA: Grand Central Press & Last Gasp.
- ^ abHirsche, Robert (2009). Seizing the Light: a Social History of Photography. New York: McGraw-Hill Higher Education. p. 34–35.
- ^Bathurst, Bella (December 2, 2013). 'The lady vanishes: Victorian photography's hidden mothers'. The Guardian. Retrieved January 28, 2018.
- ^Marien, Mary Warner (2002). Photography: A Cultural History. New York: Harry N. Abrams.
- ^ abcdRuby, Jay (1995). Secure the Shadow: Death Photography in America. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. p. 63.
- ^ abRuby, Jay. Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America.
- ^Van Der Zee, James (1978). The Harlem Book of the Dead. Dobbs Ferry, New York: Morgan and Morgan.
- ^ abcdeLinkman, Audrey (2011). Photography and Death. Reaktion. p. 69.
- ^ abcTownsend, Chris (2008). Art and Death. London: I.B. Tauris.
- ^ abSummersgill, Lauren. Visible Care: Nan Goldin and Andres Serrano’s Post-mortem Photography. Doctoral thesis (Birkbeck, University of London: 2016)
- ^Summersgill, Lauren. “‘Cookie in her Casket’ as a response to the Medical Death”. And Death Shall Have Dominion: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Dying, Caregivers, Death, Mourning, and the Bereaved, eds. K. Malecka and R. Gibbs. (London: Interdisciplinary Press, 2015).
- ^'Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep'.
- ^Fussell, Sidney. 'Should You Take Funeral Selfies?'.
- ^Edwards, Elizabeth (2005). 'Post-mortem and memorial photography'. In Lenman, Robin; Nicholsen, Angela (eds.). The Oxford Companion to the Photograph. ISBN978-0-19-866271-6.
- ^Summersgill, Lauren (2015). 'Family Expressions of Pain in Postmortem Portraiture'(PDF). Studies in Visual Arts and Communication: An International Journal. 2 – via Journal On Arts.
- ^ ab'The Myth of the Stand Alone Corpse'.
- ^'Homepage - Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep'. Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep. Retrieved April 23, 2017.
- ^Ruby, Jay. Secure the shadow.
- ^Hafsteinsson, Sigurjón Baldur (2005). 'History of Photography. Post-mortem and funeral photography in Iceland, History of Photography, 23:1, 49–54'. History of Photography. 23: 49–54. doi:10.1080/03087298.1999.10443798.
- ^Linkman, Audrey (1993). The Victorians: Photographic Portraits. London: Tauris Parke Books.
- ^Linkman, Audrey (2006). 'Taken from Life: Post-Mortem Portraiture in Britain 1860-1910'. History of Photography: An International Quarterly. 30: 309–347.
Bibliography[edit]
- Mord, Jack. (2014). Beyond the Dark Veil: Post Mortem & Mourning Photography from The Thanatos Archive. Last Gasp Press.
- Ruby, Jay. (1995). Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America. Boston: MIT Press.
- Burns, Stanley B. (1990). Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America. Twelvetrees/Twin Palms Press.
- Burns, Stanley B. and Elizabeth A. (2002). Sleeping Beauty II: Grief, Bereavement in Memorial Photography American and European Traditions. Burns Archive Press.
- Orlando, Mirko. (2010). Ripartire dagli addii: uno studio sulla fotografia post-mortem. Milano: MjM editore.
- Orlando, Mirko. (2013). fotografia post mortem. Roma: Castelvecchi.
- Vidor, Gian Marco.(2013). La photographie post-mortem dans l’Italie du XIXe et XXe siècle. Une introduction. In Anne Carol & Isabelle Renaudet 'La mort à l'oeuvre. Usages et représentations du cadavre dans l'art', Aix-en-Provence: Presses universitaires de Provence, 2013.
- Audrey Linkman (2006) Taken from life: Post-mortem portraiture in Britain
- History of Photography 1860–1910, 30:4, 309–347, DOI: 10.1080/03087298.2006.10443484
External links[edit]
Wikimedia Commons has media related to Post-mortem photography. |
Jfk Limousine Photos After Death
The photographer Garry Winogrand was known for imposing an artist’s eye on messy urban life, but when he died in 1984, after a rapidly lethal cancer, he left behind an imposing mess of uncertain artistic value: a third of a million exposed frames of film that he hadn’t edited. More than 2,500 rolls — some 100,000 frames — were undeveloped. He had never seen them.
His friend and supporter John Szarkowski, director of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, developed the unprocessed rolls and saved them from irrevocable deterioration. However, when he reviewed many contact sheets of this overabundance of late photos, Mr. Szarkowski became frustrated and angry. He included only a small sample of what he deemed “unfinished work,” plagued with “crippling mechanical flaws,” in Winogrand’s posthumous retrospective in 1988. He compared Winogrand’s late-life photographic frenzy to the sputtering that an overheated car engine continues to make after the ignition has been turned off.
“New York World’s Fair” (1964) is among the works in “Garry Winogrand,” a retrospective of the photographer’s work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
“To expose film is not quite to photograph,” Mr. Szarkowski, who died in 2007, said. How can an artist evaluate his photographs, correct his working methods and present what best expresses his vision, if he has never proofed his negatives?
In the first major Winogrand retrospective since 1988, on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art until Sept. 21, the curators argue otherwise. Leo Rubinfien, a photographer and writer, agreed to organize the show largely because he hoped to overturn Mr. Szarkowski’s verdict and demonstrate, he said, “that Winogrand was not washed up in the years I had known him.” He examined most of Winogrand’s images and devoted one-quarter of the catalog to late work, the vast majority of which Winogrand never reviewed. In all, 164 of 401 plates are posthumous.
In challenging Mr. Szarkowski’s dismissal of Winogrand’s last pictures, Mr. Rubinfien was doing more. He was poking his finger in a sore spot that has made photographers uncomfortable from the early days of the medium: the anxiety that they are plying a mechanical craft that is not truly an artistic form of expression. Is the clicking of the camera shutter only a first step, after which — if an artistic photograph is to be distinguished from the deluge of thoughtless shots — the proofing, editing and printing of the image must follow? Or can a photographer who exposes the film but goes no further nonetheless be an artist?
Such questions arose a few years ago amid the phenomenal splash of Vivian Maier, a mysterious figure who, like E. J. Bellocq and Mike Disfarmer, arrived on the photography scene having already departed this life. In 2007, John Maloof, a young man in Chicago, placed a winning auction bid on a box of anonymous negatives. It took sleuthing for him to uncover that this was the work of Ms. Maier, a professional nanny and moonlighting photographer, who had secretively hoarded her output.
Mr. Maloof eventually acquired more than 100,000 of Ms. Maier’s negatives and a small number of prints. Because she did not discuss her pictures, let alone exhibit them, it is impossible to know which images she most valued, what she intended by them or how she would have ideally printed her negatives.
Mr. Maloof said that this lack of a personal record has kept Ms. Maier, despite commercial and popular acclaim, from acceptance as a great 20th-century street photographer. More likely, that lack of consensus stems from a different murkiness: Because she photographed in so many styles, her sensibility is indistinct and a signature viewpoint is absent. Depending on which picture you are looking at, she could be Weegee, Helen Levitt, Saul Leiter, Bruce Davidson, Andre Kertesz — even Garry Winogrand.
Although they are particularly resonant in photography, the issues that surround posthumous production aren’t unique to it. Etchings are run off and bronzes are cast after the artist has died. In literature and music, unfinished work is completed by others (David Foster Wallace’s “The Pale King” and Alban Berg’s “Lulu”) or released with undisguised deficits (Charles Dickens’s “The Mystery of Edwin Drood” and Franz Schubert’s Symphony No. 8). However, when critics assess the piece, their judgments never reflect negatively on the legitimacy of the art form.
Not so in photography. There, the posthumous intervention can undermine confidence that any photograph truly depicts an artist’s sensibility. “There is an endless anxiety on the issue of how authorship works in photography,” said Jeff Rosenheim, curator in charge of the photography department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Referring to William Henry Fox Talbot, who helped invent photography in the mid-19th century, he added: “I’ve got to believe there was a lot of printing of Talbot’s negatives that he didn’t do himself. This goes back to the very beginning of the field.”
A painter like Willem de Kooning or Francis Bacon could build a canvas around an accidental gesture. No one objected. But in photography, because the camera can record a picture with an accidental click of the shutter, alarms go off. If the photographer doesn’t engage with that image — doesn’t even select it — does it qualify as artistic expression? “People involved with photography have long had a neurotic preoccupation with the fact that the camera is mechanical in nature,” Mr. Rubinfien said. “Only a tiny minority of pictures express an authorial point of view. It’s a real concern, not a false one. However, people in photography have become neurotically attached to the equation of control and artistry.”
The control of the photographer begins with the selection of the subject and its framing in the camera. From that point on, the situation varies. Edward Weston and Diane Arbus composed in the viewfinder and did not crop their pictures, but Lisette Model regarded the image on a contact sheet as raw material to be reframed for her ultimate composition. Some photographers, including Walker Evans and Robert Frank, cropped the same image in different ways at different times and thus created in their photography something comparable to the different states of an engraving or woodcut.
And there are other ways for a photographer to rethink and refashion an old picture. Although Henri Cartier-Bresson’s compositions remain constant (he didn’t crop), he printed differently at stages of his life, so the softly modulated grays in the images that he printed himself in the early 1930s reappear as high-contrast photographs that he had made for collectors in the ’60s.
But what if, like Winogrand, a photographer didn’t crop his pictures and preferred to stay out of the darkroom? What if, like Winogrand, he let others edit his work for publication and exhibition? Winogrand did make judgments. He reviewed his work until the last years, outlining the frames on his contact sheets with idiosyncratic indicators of his enthusiasm, reaching a crescendo in what Mr. Rubinfien described as a “chrysanthemum sunburst.” And yet he gave friends the impression that he hated to discriminate among his pictorial progeny. He loved them all. For such an artist, posthumous editing and printing, even of pictures he never saw, is defensible. “He didn’t care about print quality so much,” said Erin O’Toole, assistant curator of photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and a curator of the exhibition. “For him, it was all about getting the shot.”
He was not an Alfred Stieglitz or an Edward Steichen, who regarded every print as an individual handmade work of art. “With someone like Stieglitz, if his negatives were existent, I would never endorse making prints,” said Sarah Greenough, senior curator of photography at the National Gallery and the third curator of the exhibition, which originated at the San Francisco museum. “Winogrand — because he is such a headlong photographer — is a different case.”
With the assistance of digital scans, Mr. Rubinfien reviewed about a million frames and with the other curators made a selection. They re-edited Winogrand’s earlier output as well and included images that he had never marked on his contact sheets or, if he had, either failed to print or to preserve as a print. At the Met, which is displaying 175 prints, 56 are posthumous. Those will not be sold in the art market. In the exhibition, they are identified by size, printed on 14-by-17-inch paper, larger than the 11 by 14 that Winogrand favored, so that they stand out.
Contrary to Mr. Szarkowski’s dismissal of the late pictures as “willful, pointless, self-indulgent,” Mr. Rubinfien maintained that a pattern emerges from them. He acknowledged, however, that it is impossible to know whether Winogrand would have made the same choices and endorsed the same themes. The pictures that Winogrand produced after leaving New York in 1973, first while living in Austin, Tex., and then in Los Angeles, are bleak, harsh and enervated compared with his earlier work. As presented, Winogrand’s changed sensibility parallels the shift in mood in the United States that followed the late ’60s, and perhaps also reflects a regional difference between New York and the West.
Mr. Rubinfien found the few happy scenes that Winogrand captured in his late work to be weak, unconvincing photographs, but he readily conceded that the artist could have judged otherwise. “I tried very hard to understand the essential themes of Winogrand after he moved to Los Angeles and to extrapolate the later work from the earlier pictures,” he said. “Still, Winogrand could have said: ‘I hate this work. I’m burning it.’ ”
Guessing what a dead artist would have done is risky. “Crossing that line into understanding where an artist was going is something you do very cautiously,” said Anne Wilkes Tucker, curator of photography at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, speaking generally and not of the Winogrand exhibition, which she hasn’t seen. Her inclination, she said, is not to cross the line.
But not crossing that line has consequences, too. When the last paintings of J. M. W. Turner were displayed after his death in 1851, even John Ruskin — who, as Turner’s most eloquent proponent, did for him what Mr. Szarkowski did for Winogrand — denounced the late work as symptoms of decline that should never have been shown to the public. That was the general view. Now, they are widely deemed to be creations of prophetic genius and will be the subject of a major exhibition that opens in September at the Tate Britain.
Winogrand’s final posthumous pictures may never win such acclaim, but the curators of the new exhibition maintain that they deserve to be seen. “It was better to bring out the work and let it live or die on its own merits than to let it lie in a box,” Ms. O’Toole said. And while the late photographs lack the vigorous originality and excitement of Winogrand’s greatest accomplishments, the decision to include as many as humanly possible seems appropriate. For Winogrand, who pooh-poohed fastidious pretensions and reveled in surfeit, more was more. He was asked in 1977 if he didn’t wish to make choices. He replied: “That I never do. All I do is say yes.”