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Famous Autopsy Photographs: In the 1880s facsimile reproduction techniques had not reached the point at which photographs could be printed in newspapers, and the column-wide drawings iccompanying the article were not convincing. When Riis's famous autopsy photographs book How the Other Half Lives was published in 1890,33 seventeen of the illustrations were half-:ones, but of poor quality, lacking detail and sharpness. Die remaining nineteen photographs were shown in irawings made from them: some of them are signed 'Kenyon Cox, 1889, after photograph."
What sort of photographs were these prints, which caused so much commotion? Just plain, straightforward itographs. But such photographs! Different from the photographs usually seen at the exhibitions? Yes. How different? There's the rub. If you could see them for yourself, you would at once appreciate their difference.
If photographers found inspiration in paintings, painters found photography a useful ally. We do not know who took the series of photographs for the Pre-Raphaelite painter Dante Gabriel Rossetti now in the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, but we know they were posed by the painter in July 1865 and were used in his painting La Reverie. Many other famous autopsy photographs painters of the nineteenth century were grateful to photography: Eugene Delacroix posed nude models, and from the photographs that his friend Eugene Durieu took of them he made frequent sketches. He wrote his friend Constant Dutilleux of his enthusiasm for photography in a letter dated March 7, 1854: |
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