著者

甲斐 義明

出版者

東京大学大学院人文社会系研究科グローバルCOEプログラム「死生学の展開と組織化」

雑誌

死生学研究 (ISSN:18826024)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.16, pp.30-51, 2011-10-31

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Recently, nineteenth-century art photography distinctive for its "pictorialism" has been re-evaluated in the discourses of the history of photography. However, mainstream scholarship, which emphasizes the affinity between photography and other art forms such as painting or literature, has generally ignored the "photographic-ness" of pictorial photography. This paper examines how the work of English photographer Henry Peach Robinson, a representative figure in nineteenth-century art photography, embodied the medium-specificity of photography. It will do so by paying special attention to his works that deal with the themes of sleep and death, such as Fading Away (1858), The Lady of Shalott (1860), and Sleep (1867). In nineteenth-century Western culture, it was not unusual for people to commission professional photographers to take photographs of their dead family members before burials took place. In those postmortem photographs the corpse was typically depicted as if he or she were just "sleeping." It is important to realize that such a disguise was made possible by the power of photography, in which the states of being dead or asleep are often indistinguishable from one another. For Robinson, who tried to produce his photographic works strictly as he intended, such an instability of meaning was nothing but an obstacle to his creation. Indeed, Robinson finally stopped tackling the themes of death and sleep in his work and instead turned to more lively subject matter.