Group Blog Post (Kelly, Jess, Jennifer)

“How true it is, that it is too late to catch the living form and face of our dear friends, and well illustrates the necessity of procuring those more than life-like resemblances of our friends, ere it is too late— ere the hand of death has snatched away those we prize so dearly on earth.”

Taking Portraits After Death. N. G. Burgess

From The Photographic and Fine-Art Journal Vol. 8, No. 3

March 1855 Page 80

The description of this item is brief. It is an ambrotype from the Woodward manuscript collection. The item is listed as an “interesting example of post-mortem portrait of baby along with a woven piece of hair.” Other images are listed as part of the collection, but these two objects, as they are listed in one sentence, are presented as a unit. Therefore, our group treated them as one item in two parts. In this way, the description scripted out treatment of the items (Bernstein’s idea of scriptivity; Phelan’s point that writing changes the performance) – we wouldn’t have considered them together otherwise.

Course Blog 12: 2nd Responder (Jennifer to Andrea)

Andrea: In what ways does the object incorporate untimely matter through supercession, explosion, and conjunction? (from Harris' analysis of the Archimedes Palimpsest)

Definition Notes: 

Supersession: New layering over old in a palimpsest of progress (21)

Explosion: Old is not lost – it can intervene and affect the present; “antagonistic”  (22)

Conjunction: current contains ancient in a way that “literally touches”  and engages in “untimely dialogue”

Analysis of Roach:  

Roach reads the practice of Mardi Gras krewe parades through a series of photographs and his memory of the last of the krewe parades. He claims that these krewes and other social clubs “promote a sense of timelessness based on their apparently seamless repetition of traditional roles” (Roach 18). Therefore, he is reading their performances as conjunctive. The costumes, schedule, route, and even reactions of the audience are scripted by the tradition: “Every year there is a new Rex and a new King Zulu, and every year they are supposed to look and act as they always have” (19). To this end, he chooses images from 1991 (19), 1971 (22), and 1940 (23). This implies that the date of the picture is irrelevant (one isn't even dated at all) – each of the images will be the same. However, they are conjunctive because they concurrently exist and interact with each other and the modern world in an “untimely dialogue” about issues of race relations in a contested space (Harris 22).