“This book presents the most substantial selection of images yet published from the renowned Burns Archive. Over 100 masterpieces of early medical photography are reproduced along with descriptive texts by Dr. Stanley Burns detailing the medical, sociological and historical significance of the photographs. The rise of modern medicine parallels the rise of photography as a documentary tool, and in this broad-based overview of the Archive we sense the experimental state of both during the 19th century. Included are images which celebrate the physician’s essential position in society, and those which reveal his near helplessness in the face of many diseases. The chronological presentation of the photographs heightens our awareness of just how profound are the changes brought about by advances in medicine, and by the introduction of such tools as the camera. As a document of the human condition A Morning’s Work shows the pain, suffering, joy and fear of its subjects as they confront the camera, and, we presume, their diagnoses. The hope and horror contained in these images mirror contemporary medicine’s “miracles” and failures, and reflect the unchanging nature of the human experience.”

Publisher: Twin Palms
Hardback: 164 pages
Illustrated

“Postmortem photography, photographing a deceased person, was a common practice in the 19th and early 20th centuries. These photographs were often the only ones taken of their subjects, and much pride and artistry went into them… These photographs were a common aspect of American culture, a part of the mourning and memorialization process. Surviving families were proud of these images and hung them in their homes, sent copies to friends and relatives, wore them as lockets or carried them as pocket mirrors… Discussions of death in books are prolific, and we are accustomed to images of death as part of our daily news, but actual death as part of private lives has become a shameful and unspoken subject.
“This volume presents a chronological arrangement of postmortem photography 1840-1930; no other collection of this material has been made available despite recent interest in the American way of death. What emerges is a vivid visual history of the changes in American customs. We can see the change in death concepts and funerary practices, from the image of death as a stark Puritan journey for a sinner to the late Victorian beautification of death and its interpretation as a restful sleep for a redeemed soul… More than anything else, I hope these photographs will help the modern American overcome the death taboo and better understand the fear of death, to solve some important death-related cultural issues, and to choose to use photography as part of the grieving process.”—Dr. Stanley Burns

Publisher: Twin Palms
Hardback: 140 pages
Illustrated

A most disturbing and depressing photographic essay about the Khmer Rouge, who were in power under Pol Pot in Cambodia for over three years. After seizing power in ‘75 they started “cleaning house” and taking prisoners. Photographs of each prisoner before interrogation, torture and ultimately the execution of some 14,000 people. Believing, it seems, that they were destroying traitors who were infecting the Communist Party. The photos and documentation were apparently meant to be used by officials as an example of their “progress” against the enemies of the revolution.Only seven of the people pictured survived. One survivor named Nath tells his grim story of torture and starvation in a Cambodian prison. S-21 is the innteragation facility at Tuol Sleng Prison, the Cambodian equivalent of Auschwitz. One day Nath was “appointed” to cut rattan in the forest. He said goodbye to his family and not knowing his fate, left and was taken to Tuol Sleng. But he was an honest man and didn’t know why he was arrested. At the prison, torture and forced confessions were the order of the day, although the people confessing were usually innocent of the crime they confessed to, Pol Pot and Duch (the chief of the prison) being the guilty ones with paranoid delusions. Vietnamese troops finally overthrow their regime. Nath escaped with his life and managed to find his wife but learned his children had died of disease and starvation. Later that same year the Museum of Genocide was created on the grounds of the former prison were these photos were taken, bleak reminders of that inhumane cruelty. One look and one can sense the impending doom; one look and one is inside S-21. DW

Publisher: Twin Palms
Hardback: 124 pages
Illustrated

Photographic master of the beauty of the grotesque. With the lush, timeless feeling of daguerrotypes, Witkin photographs transform the “shocking” into sensual tableaux: a severed head on a plate, Siamese twins joined at the head, hermaphroditic Venuses, a dead-meat cornucopia, a man on a bed of nails… all interspersed with visual references to classic art pieces and Christian iconography.

Publisher: Twin Palms
Hardback: 124 pages
Illustrated

“In 1994, New York artist Alexis Rockman ventured to the dense jungle of Guyana, the site for this fantastic dreamscape of biological life, flora and fauna. Rockman’s world of nature is tempered by a penchant for the bizarre and the grotesque, but is always based upon careful scrutiny and intimate observation of the environs. Drawing from a host of visual sources that include science fiction films, historical landscape and genre paintings, biology illustrations, and museum dioramas, Guyana depicts the predatory and violent narrative of the ecosphere. Monumental insects—ants, mites, bees and beetles—vie on Rockman’s vibrant canvasses with anteaters, exotic birds, piranhas and iguanas.”

Publisher: Twin Palms
Hardback: 88 pages
Illustrated