Product Details
Hardcover
168 pages
University of Texas Press
Published 2001
From Library Journal
This elegantly designed book features 81 photographs by Australian-born artist Breakey, a self-proclaimed naturalist who makes "post-mortem" photographs of birds, plants, and other small creatures. These oddly reverent "portraits" of dead subjects are enhanced with such creative photographic techniques as shallow depth of field and painstaking hand coloring methods that transform decaying animals and plants into colorful and romantic memorials. Breakey, who has exhibited widely in the United States and abroad, credits the influence of natural history dioramas, but the works here are firmly rooted in fine art photography, not science or history. Noted photography critic A.D. Coleman's insightful foreword draws comparisons between Breakey's work and the history of art and photography, but Small Deaths is essentially a collection of beautiful, highly personal photographs, not a scholarly or theoretical work. Recommended for larger public libraries and general collections. Shauna Frischkorn, Millersville Univ., PA
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Synopsis
Small lives end every day - the unfledged bird fallen from its nest, the unwary lizard caught by a cat - as unnoticed in dying as they were living. Deeply moved by these small deaths since her childhood in south Australia, photographer-artist Kate Breakey has been photographing found animal remains since the mid-1990s, creating oversized, hand-coloured images that - paradoxically - glow with life. This volume is devoted to the photographs of Kate Breakey. It gathers 81 colour images from her... read more
Book Description
Small lives end every day--the unfledged bird fallen from its nest, the unwary lizard caught by a cat--as unnoticed in dying as they were living. Deeply moved by these small deaths since her childhood in South Australia, photographer-artist Kate Breakey has been photographing found animal remains since the mid-1990s, creating stunning, oversized, hand-colored images that--paradoxically--glow with life. This volume is the first book-length work devoted to the photographs of Kate Breakey. It gathers 75 color images from her ongoing "Small Deaths" series. These birds, flowers, lizards, and insects vividly express Breakey's desire to preserve each lost creature--to "freeze it in time, suspend it in space, immortalize it so that its beauty and its death are memorialized." In a brief afterword, Breakey traces the origins of her art to a childhood spent among domestic and rescued animals on the Australian coast. In the introduction, noted art critic A. D. Coleman links Breakey's work to the larger traditions of still-life painting and the postmortem photography of the nineteenth century. |
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