Small Deaths: Photographs (Southwestern & Mexican Photography Series, The Wittliff Collections at Texas State University)
Price 50.74 - 65.00 USD
Small lives end every dayâthe unfledged bird fallen from its nest, the unwary lizard caught by a catâas unnoticed in dying as they were living. Deeply moved by these small deaths since her childhood in South Australia, photographer-artist Kate Breakey has been photographing found animal remains since the mid-1990s, creating stunning, oversized, hand-colored images thatâparadoxicallyâglow with life. This volume is the first book-length work devoted to the photographs of Kate Breakey. It gathers color images from her ongoing "Small Deaths" series. These birds, flowers, lizards, and insects vividly express Breakey"s desire to preserve each lost creatureâto "freeze it in time, suspend it in space, immortalize it so that its beauty and its death are memorialized." In a brief afterword, Breakey traces the origins of her art to a childhood spent among domestic and rescued animals on the Australian coast. In the introduction, noted art critic A. D. Coleman links Breakey"s work to the larger traditions of still-life painting and the postmortem photography of the nineteenth century.