Postmortem Photography at the Boston Book & Paper Exposition

Saturday, May 5th, The Burns Archive participated in the Boston Book and Paper Expo in Wilmington, MA. Leigh Infield Associates helped to host the booth, which featured a sale of all Burns Press titles, as well as antique photographs and vintage medical books. The main focus of the booth was the expose of enlargements from the Burns Postmortem Photography Collection. There where over 85 exhibitors at the impressive Shiner's Auditorium. Please enjoy the video with highlights from the show as well as a few pics from the Burns Archive Booth.

Exhibition Coverage: Gothic to Goth at the Allentown Art Museum

Dr. Burns presented his lecture Photographing the Dead at the Allentown Art Museum, Sunday, August 29th. The talk accompanied the exhibition Gothic to Goth, which featured 19th century mourning dresses, jewelry, photographs, embroideries and more. The Burns Collection participated with several postmortem daguerreotypes and ambrotypes as well as a mourning broach (as featured in the purple case below).

 Dr. Stanley Burns and John Pepper of The Allentown Art Museum

An overview of the exhibition featuring 19th Century mourning dresses and accessories as well as modern goth fashions.

Display case featuring postmortem images from The Burns Collection.

Needlework Mourning Picture

Allegorical Mourning Painting 'Innocence & Friendship'

Victorian Hair Work

Exhibition Introduction

Dr. Burn describing the most common pose in memorial photography: the image of a parent holding their deceased child. Child deaths were frequent in the 19th century. One out of every five children died before the age of five.

A book signing followed the lecture.

 Sample Images Discussed in the lecture:

Prior to the twentieth century, multiple births frequently resulted in the death of babies. (Maternal mortality was also high, with about twenty percent of mothers dying in or soon after childbirth in the pre-antiseptic era.) This mother poses with her newborn twins. Today, an important part of the modern bereavement process is for parents to be photographed with their stillborn or neonatally deceased infant. The picture serves not only as a memorial of the child’s existence, but also as a document of its state of disease. Parents’ memories of their children’s condition at birth is usually erroneous, and over time, the abnormalities may become further exaggerated in their mind. Actually, dead children, as with these infants here, may look quite normal.

To learn more about memorial photography, please view Dr. Burns' three volumes on the subject:

     

Upcoming Lecture- Sleeping Beauties: Postmortem Photography

Lecture with Stanley B. Burns, MD, with book signing following

Sun, Apr 29 2012, 2:00pm - 4:00pm

Allentown Art Museum of the Lehigh Valley

31 North Fifth Street, Allentown, PA 1810

Members $5.00  Non Members $15.00

Dr. Burns recognized the importance of this phenomenon when he bought his first postmortem photographs in 1976. Since that time he has amassed the most comprehensive collection of postmortem photography in the world and has curated several exhibits and published three books on the subject: the Sleeping Beauty series. Dr. Burns will talk about the practice of postmortem photography from the 19th century until today and share images from his collection. A book signing follows.

This lecture is in conjunction with the current special exhibition, "Gothic to Goth: Embracing the Dark Side," through April 29, 2012 in the Goodman Gallery. 'Gothic to Goth' offers an overview of the nineteenth-century cult of mourning in American art and fashions, and indicates how that trend translated into contemporary Goth fashion - a genre now embraced by mainstream designers as well as the rock subculture of the twentieth century. 

ADDITIONAL COVERAGE FROM THE EXPRESS-TIMES:

Allentown Art Museum of the Lehigh Valley to host talk from post-mortem photography historian

By Tiffany Bentley

Post-mortem photography was a common practice in the 19th and early 20th centuries, according to photography archivist Dr. Stanley Burns.

The photos were used as memorials, not as documentation or to shock as in stories of violent deaths, Burns says. The photos, from the start of their use until now, serve as a momento of the deceased person to the living. 

"These images formed an important part of the bereavement process as well as the memorial process," Burns says.
 

Although post-mortem photographs make up a large group of 19th century American artifacts, it was only until recent years the photos have been brought out into the open, according to Burns' research.

Burns, who is also an ophthalmologist and clinical professor of medicine and psychiatry at New York University Langone Medical Center, will give a lecture on the practice of photographing the deceased 2 p.m. April 29 at the Allentown Art Museum of the Lehigh Valley.

Burns has written books on the subject and has maintained a vast archive of photos. He will include a slide show of the photographs, showing a chronology of the practice from the 1800's until modern day, in his lecture.

May of the photos are actually difficult to tell if there is a deceased person in the picture.

"Disease struck quickly, so the people look healthy," Burns says. "Today you don’t have these pictures because we keep people alive with tubes and fluids so people look sick."

Burns' interest in the subject began when he was researching medical photographs of death and disease and came across posed portraits. He began researching the practice and custom through advertisements, articles and other photographs from the time.
 

"In our culture, death has become a taboo," Burns says. "In the 19th century death was a part of everyday life."

Burns has also taken modern day post-mortem photos of his relatives, including some of his father that he published in one of his books, "Sleeping Beauty II..."

Dr. Burns' lecture is being held in conjunction with the current special exhibition at Allentown Art Museum, "Gothic to Goth: Embracing the Dark Side" running through April 29, which also includes post-mortem photographs.

For more information on the talk and exhibit visit allentownartmuseum.org.

Exhibition: Holocaust Remeberance Week at The National Arts Club

The First Exhibition of Artwork by Stanley B. Burns, MD   

The German Mindset: Action in the Name of Germany by Common Perpetrators

Through April 27, 2012, The National Arts Club, 15 Gramercy Park South, New York, NY

Dr. Stanley Burns’ multimedia images of the Holocaust add a new visual dimension – a ‘Word-Image’ to a topic that never ceases to be examined and reexamined. 

During 50 years of searching through tens of thousands of private images taken by German soldiers, Dr. Burns has uncovered a series of significant images and imbued them with a power beyond the imagination of the soldiers who recorded them. Burns has integrated a poignant caption into a colorized image that facilitates comprehension and expresses his wrath and bitter resentment with the inhumanity of Nazi Germany. This exhibition consists of two elements. The first includes prints following a time line of prewar persecution, wartime camp experiences and immigration to Israel. Several noted Holocaust images are shown. The second is Dr. Burns’ original multimedia art works. These unique images from Burns’ Nazi soldier album collection are transformed by his personal statements and confrontation with the nature of corrupt German serviceman. These ‘Word Images’ are powerful statements from which the observer can better understand the mentality of the perpetrators who are pictured having a good time as they went about their business of abusing and killing Jews.

We Wanted the War

In October 1939 Warsaw capitulated and surrendered after a month of unrestricted bombardment by the Luftwaffe that included a terror bombing campaign against civilian targets. A few days after the Nazi’s entered the city, a Wehrmacht officer rounded up a group of religious Jews and forced them to parade around the center of the bombed city. The sign reads “We Wanted the War.” The front of the cart reads “The Jews are our Misfortune.”

Unfortunately for Polish Jews, the non-Jewish inhabitants didn’t need any additional goading. Anti-Semitism was rampant throughout much of the country. Although there were many Polish citizens who protected Jews during the war, there where more who directly participated in the massacres of thousands. Perhaps one of the best examples is that even after the war when knowledge of the decimation of Polish Jewery was well known, the 40 Jews who survived the Shoah were killed in a Kielce Blood-Libel type pogrom on July 4, 1946. The episode created worldwide condemnation and is credited as being the catalyst for the immigration of most of the Jews from Poland. The number of Polish Jews killed in WWII is about 3,000,000 of the 5.8 million Jews who died in the Holocaust.

Wehrmacht Motorcycle Unit’s Fun and Games in Tarnopol Ukraine

An officer of a motorcycle detachment stands like an Egyptian overlord while his Jewish slaves build him a pyramid of hay bundles. One of the legends of Jewish history was that during the enslavement in Egypt, they were workers who helped build the pyramids. The story of the flight from Egypt is recounted every year at Passover. The enslavement in Egypt may have been on the minds of these men as they toiled on a hot July day to obey their new masters.

Tarnopol was in the province of Lvov in Poland until the Russians took control of it in 1939. The city of about 40,000 was 50% Polish and 40% Jewish. 18,000 Jews lived in Tarnopol. On June 22, 1941 Hitler attacked Russia. Tarnopol was entered at the end of June when the events pictured took place.  By June 1941 Jews knew of the extermination of communities in Poland and perhaps thought they were safe in Soviet controlled territory.

Pyramid building was only a waiting game as other Nazi units flooded the city. From July 4th to July 11th, over 5,000 Jews were killed. About 12,500 were herded into a ghetto. Over the next two years thousands were systematically slaughtered until the final liquidation on June 20, 1943. Poles contributed to the slaughter of Jews – about 500 were killed by Poles with borrowed weapons from the German troops who were ever ready to help local inhabitants in their dirty work. At the end of WWII. The Russians found 150 Jews in hiding with Partisans in the area and 200 returned who had fled into Russia. By the 1960s 500 Jews were living in Tarnopol. These unique photographs survive to help point a finger at Wehrmacht soldiers in their complacency with Hitler’s and Himmler’s Final Solution.

This Town is Jew Free

‘HALT’ reads the sign on this entrance to a small German town in 1938. The sign announces the town is Jew free and no Jews are welcome. Two anti-Semitic charactertures of a Jewish man and woman with large noses adorn the sign. This symbolism is much like the current usage of a line through an image that means no.

Professional Executioners

Their caps telegraph their unit ‘Field Police.’ These are the men of a notorious Polish execution squad of the SD. The SD,  (Sicherheitsdienst des Reichsführers-SS.) was the intelligence agency of the SS and the Nazi Party. It was often considered a "sister organization" with the Gestapo. In Poland one of their jobs was to kill prisoners and Jews and they did this in a humane way by a bullet in the back of the bent head making sure to hit the cerebellum, which destroyed bodily functions instantaneously. Here in the forests of the Poland in 1942, depicted as if in an occupational photograph of the nineteenth century, these executioners proudly display the tools of their trade: the 9mm Parabellum Lugar pistol.

Celebrating Murder

This happy soldier is depicted in this snapshot as a hero at a celebration by his cohorts for his great work. Around his neck is a Jewish Star. In the center are the letters G F P, the dreaded initials of the Geheim Feldpolizei – Secret Field Police. These units were the secret military police of the Wehrmacht. Among their duties was to work alongside the notorious SS Einsatzgruppen, the mobile killing squads, whose sole job was the extermination of Jews, Gypsies and communists. They did this by shooting them. They killed over one million (33,771 in Babi Yar, over 25,000 in Rumbala, etc.). Heinrich Himmler, the head of the SS helped devise extermination facilities with gas chambers primarilybecause the shooting of Jews was hard work and took a toll on the shooters.

The einsatzgruppen and the GFP worked safely behind the lines and under the protection of the Wehrmacht. The GFP also mounted operations to systematically burn down homes and entire villages. Toward the end of war the GFP was transferred from the Wehrmacht to the SS where they were responsible for summarily executing prisoners before the arrival of the advancing Red Army. For example, in 1943 one GFP report to SS and Police Leader William Krichbaum stated that on the Eastern Front 21,000 people had been killed… "many shot after interrogation." While the Gestapo is well known today they did not do the mass  killings the GFP did.

This happy fellow in a unit still under Wehrmacht control in 1941 proudly displays his medal. There is little doubt his unit was killing Jews in this time period. Perhaps the number 608 on his Yellow Star is his unit number, perhaps the number he killed that day. This image came from private wartime photo album. These documents are among the best evidences of criminality. If this smiling fellow was captured, this photograph would belie his explanation that he was only a lowly private in the army.

History of the Burns Holocaust Collection

Collector, curator and historian Stanley B. Burns, MD has written 43 photo historical texts and has curated over 50 exhibitions from his collection of about one million vintage images. Burns owns perhaps the largest private photographic Judaica and Holocaust collection. In the early 1970s before he collected photography Dr. Burns lectured regularly on Jewish physicians in the Holocaust. He ultimately took over the practice of a noted Berlin ophthalmologist who immigrated to the United States in 1937. The practice consisted of noted German Jewish personalities as well as some prior Nazis. Dr Burns began accumulating Holocaust related ephemera and photographs as the nations’ Holocaust museums were being formed. He served as a photography consultant to the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC. In 1994 the collection was showcased in the noted Jewish periodical Forward. In 1999 when a traveling exhibition from Homburg of photographs documenting the Wehrmacht and genicide was cancelled Dr. Burns offered his own similar collection to supplement the lectures on the subject at NYU.  On the 60th anniversary of the founding of Israel he had two exhibitions on the immigration of Jews to Israel in the 1940s showing his images of the Irgun blockade runner the Ben Hecht.

The Burns Holocaust collection consists mainly of images in five general categories. First are the hundreds of photographs of Eastern European Jews and towns from the 1890s through 1940s. These show the towns and people that were destroyed. The images depict life in shtetls and cities and provides vivid evidence of a rich religious and secular life. The second category includes images taken in Germany and Europe prior to the War documenting the rise of Nazism and persecution of Jews, Gypsies and the disabled. The third and perhaps most interesting aspect of the collection are the over 100 albums taken by German servicemen who photographed their experiences in Western and Eastern Europe especially France, Poland and Russia. These personal albums provide great insight into the experiences and behavior of German servicemen. The images were taken for personal use, representing the social, cultural and private actions of individuals. Such soldiers were not under orders and used their cameras frequently as one does today to capture moments of significance, celebration and triumph. The fourth section consists of hundreds of images taken by Allied sources at the end of the war directly related to the Shoah and conquest of Germany. These images are original prints made at time. The fifth aspect of the collection are thousands of photographs of the immigration and settlement of Jews in Israel 1930-1950. 

Images from the reception, April 17, 2012:

Review for Shooting Soldiers in Blue & Gray Magazine

Reviewed by John Michael Priest in Vol XXVIII #5

As a historian, I have had a fascination with medicine throughout the ages, my favorite source being the ten volume Surgical and Medical History of the Civil War. I have visited the superb Civil War Medical Museum in Frederick, MD and have edited the wartime letters and diary of Hospital Steward John N. Henry, 49th New York. Burns’ wonderful book will also have a prominent place among my favorite books about the Civil War.
   

Doctor Burns begins the work with a detailed biography of Reed B. Bontecou, a person about whom I knew nothing, despite having seen samples from his collection in the surgical history of the war. Besides having the larges known collection of Civil War medical photographs, Bontecou later developed the first antiseptic wound packet for use by individual soldiers, and in 1897 he unsuccessfully attempted to repair a typhoidal intestinal perforation–the first such operation ever performed in the United States.
 

This book, the first in a series, contains 101 graphic images of identified Federal and Confederate casualties from the collection of Surgeon Bontecou, who had them taken at Harewood Hospital in Washington, DC. Each photograph includes Bontecou’s notations about the injuries. He meticulously recorded each man’s name, company, and regiment to preserve them for posterity. I could not get over how young many of these hapless individuals looked. The pictures drove home how terrible wounds actually looked.
 

Shooting Soldiers is a masterpiece. It should be in the library of every serious Civil War student or novelist because it will dispel any prior conceptions about the effects of muzzle-loading projectiles on a human being. For me, seeing the faces of the men portrayed in this book and knowing who they were has made the war all the more personal.     

A new edition of Mike Priest’s Before Antietam: The Battle for South Mountain with foreword by Ed Bearss was published in 2011.
 

TO PURCHASE SHOOTING SOLDIERS VISIT THE BURNS PRESS BOOK STORE BY CLICKING HERE

NYC Photo Show and Daguerreotype Book Release

   The Burns Archive was at the New York Photo Show this weekend 
after a tour of both the London and Washington DC fairs. The public was invited to attend the event Saturday, March 31 at The Lighthouse, 111 East 59th St, and stop by The Burns Archive booth to meet Dr. Burns and view books and images for sale.

Burns Press books (including the newly released Mirror, Mirror: The Burns Collection Daguerreotypes) were sold.

The aforementioned London Photo Fair:

Collector Andrew Daneman of Northern Light Gallery

Brad Feuerhelm of Daniel Blau Gallery

Finds from the Washington D.C. Antique Photo Show

Dr. Burns recently attended the Washington D.C. Antique Photo & Postcard Show to promote his Gem Series Books. Dr. Burns photographed the show as part of his decades long documentation of historical photography events. The Burns Archive and Collection will also have a booth at the upcoming New York Photo Show, where Dr. Burns will be signing his Civil War and Sleeping Beauty III books. He will also be presenting his new work Mirror, Mirror: The Burns Collection Daguerreotypes, which will be released in June. Pre-orders are now being accepted.

 Views from the  D.C. Antique Photo Show:

Postmortem Photography Exhibition at Allentown Art Museum

Gothic to Goth: Embracing the Dark Side
Tuesday - Saturday 11AM - 5PM, Sunday  12PM - 5PM, Monday Closed
Through April 29, 2012


Dr.Burns was scheduled to lecture, 4/19/12, 
on his postmortem and mourning photography collection.

Allentown Art Museum
31 North Fifth Street
Allentown, PA 18101


 

Curated By Soody Sisco

It might be said that death, art, and fashion went hand in hand in America in the nineteenth century. The death of George Washington in 1799 spurred an outpouring of public mourning that found expression in a new genre of art that encompassed memorial paintings, prints, public monuments, mourning kerchiefs, ceramics, and, not least, needlework. Mourning art was considered a beautiful and appropriate—even sophisticated and fashionable—art form rather than a frivolous or morbid fascination with death. It encouraged an interweaving of religious, social, and aesthetic ideas drawn from the neoclassical ideal of the “heroic death,” as well as the burgeoning Romantic Movement.  As literature with macabre gothic overtones gained popularity, emotional expressions of sentimentality, melancholy, and even horror and terror became commonplace.

The presentation of grief and sorrow became an art in itself in the Victorian era (1837 – 1901) as England’s Queen Victoria brought the expression of mourning to its zenith following the death of her husband, Prince Albert in 1861. On both sides of the Atlantic, elaborate mourning outfits became de rigeur, along with codified rituals for their wearing.  As the American public rapidly assimilated both the social mores and fashionable tastes of mourning, the late nineteenth century became widely known for its prominence of elaborate and ostentatious mourning fashion. Almost a hundred years later, the silhouettes and styles of Victorian mourning wear made a vigorous reappearance with the emergence of the Goth subculture in the late 1970s, although now with a vocabulary of nonconformity and self-expression rather than the moral obligations of earlier years.

Gothic to Goth offered an overview of the nineteenth-century cult of mourning in American art and fashion and indicates how that trend translated into contemporary Goth fashion, a genre now embraced by mainstream couture as well as by the rock subculture of the twentieth century. Included in the exhibition are representative examples of mourning art such as needle pictures, paintings, and postmortem daguerreotype portraits; mourning jewelry and other accessories; two late Victorian mourning outfits; and examples of contemporary Goth fashion inspired by the mourning excesses of the earlier century. Objects from the museum’s own collections were supplemented by loans from the Everhart Museum, Burns Archive, Lackawanna Historical Society, Sigal Museum, Drexel Historic Costume Collection, the designer Kambriel, Heavy Red Couture Noir and custom jewelry designer and manufacturer Atelier Gothique

Exhibition Opening: African American Portraits 1900-1920

Community Life: African American Portraits from the Burns Archive 1900-1920

and

Ming Smith: Film Noir  

Feb 1- February 12, 2012

Reception Thursday February 2, 6-8pm

 This exhibition was free and open to the public.

The National Arts Club

15 Gramercy Park South, New York, NY 10003

     In honor of African American History month, The National Arts Club Photography Committee presented a two-part exhibition. A group of photographs by contemporary photographer Ming Smith and a series of historic images from Dr. Stanley B Burns’ collection were on view.

     These images supplement the traveling exhibition currently on display at the New York State Museum in Albany: Shadows & Substance: African American Photographs from the Burns Collection and Archive. Since 1979, Dr. Burns’ pioneering exhibitions of African American photography have documented the proud middle and working classes and community life that have so long been absent from visual and written history of the early twentieth century.

     Ming Smith lives in Harlem and has traveled the world with her camera. Her journey is “emotionally packed” as Gordon Parks remarks, in his introduction to Ming’s book. From her Ohio childhood to the large cities of America, Europe, Africa and Asia she “continually taps the intuitive and renders it in a form that is coherent and accessible” (Susan Kismaric, MOMA, Ming- A Ming Breakfast, Preface 1991). Her series encompasses topics including jazz, the black experience, Harlem, Native America, Africa and Paris. Ming Smith’s photography belongs to a tradition that adheres to the belief that the photograph is grounded in the artist’s experience of the world.

If interested in historical African American photographs you may enjoy in these posts as well:

New York State Museum Exhibits Historic African American Photos from The Burns Archive

Rare African American Photographs from the Ken Ogden Holdings Added to  Collection

Teaming up for a Historic Forensic Project

     Dr. Stanley Burns and noted forensic pathologist Dr. Michael Baden met to discuss a joint volume on the photographic history of forensic science. This unique project will include Dr. Burns’ historic photos documenting the genesis of medical forensic studies from the 1860s on. These images will be combined with Dr. Baden’s own photographs taken over five decades of work as a medical examiner. Baden’s noted high-profile pathology and expert witness cases have included John F. Kennedy, Czar Nicholas II, Sid Vicious, OJ Simpson and John Belushi. Dr. Baden’s HBO’s Autopsy series is recognized as the first forensic television program. Burns’ photographs have been in numerous exhibitions on historical crime photography and featured on HBO’s Autopsy.

Dr. Michael Baden, Photo by ForensicScience.net

Dr. Stanley Burns Viewing the Baden Collection

Houston Dermatological Society: Dermatology in the 19th Century

On Monday, December 12, Stanley Burns MD, FACS lectured as guest speaker for the Houston Dermatological Society's annual ethics meeting in Houston, Texas.

Nineteenth Century Photography and its Role in the Creation of Modern Dermatology

The core of the lecture consisted of over 250 nineteenth century photographs of dermatological patients.

A Few Topics Discussed:

• Worldwide- Dermatologists produced more photographic atlases than all other medical fields combined.
• New York Dermatologists produced the greatest number of photographic atlases.
• New York’s George Henry Fox, one of the six founders of the American Dermatological Association, produced more atlases than any other physician. He influenced generations of dermatologists.
• Photography produced an objective detailed description.
• Provided a permanent document for future evaluation.
• Allowed non specialists to recognize skin disease.

Dr. Burns with HDS President Melissa Bogle, MD

Melissa Bogle, MD with Asra Ali, MD

The Attendees at Brennan's of Houston

Featured Images:

To Learn More About 19th Century Dermatology 

Read Dr. Burns' Four Volume Series 'Skin Pictures'