Dissection Photography

Brandon Zimmerman has worked as an exhibit developer, designer, curator, and consultant for numerous museums, libraries, and archives throughout the United States for 20 years. He holds an MA in Photographic Preservation and Collections Management from the University of Rochester.

• Introduction: My Companions in Misery1. The Stages of an Evolving Genre 2. Photography Is Dead 3. Defining Disgust: Abjection, Photography, and the Cadaver4. Is Dissection Photography Really a Genre?5. Iconographic Ambiguities 6. A Necessary Inhumanity7. No One Ever Did: Dissection Photography and Female Identity8. Of Sharp Minds and Sharpened Tools: Dissection Photography and the Ambiguity of the Scalpel9. Flesh in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction10. Location, Location, Location11. Anatomical Deuteranopia12. To Begin without Fear13. The Cadaver as (Self-)PortraitConclusion: “Learning to Fight Death Next to Death Itself”

“Vividly detailed, incisively analytical, and thoroughly engaging, this is a welcome contribution to our understanding of dissection room portraiture, an iconic genre of medical photography and a revealing wedge into turn-of-the-century medical culture.” John Harley Warner, Yale University