Description

Small lives end every day--the unfledged bird fallen from its nest, the unwary lizard caught by a cat--as 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 that--paradoxically--glow with life. This volume is the first book-length work devoted to the photographs of Kate Breakey. It gathers 75 color images from her ongoing Small Deaths series. These birds, flowers, lizards, and insects vividly express Breakey's desire to preserve each lost creature--to 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.