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American Family Memorial Imagery, The Photograph, And The Search For Immortality, Daniel Gyger Snyder

Art & Art History ETDs

In this dissertation I trace the development of family (as opposed to public) memorial imagery and note the unique contribution of photography. I examine attitudes toward photography during its early years. These attitudes reveal that the medium was uniquely appropriate for the continuation and extension of the tradition of memorial imagery in America.

I suggest that America holds expectations for the Machine and for the power of Science that have at various times (the mid-nineteenth century and today) led some to assume that death is not inevitable and that physical Immortality is possible. From Puritan times, when death was accepted, …