Consider Robert Rauschenberg's "Erased de Kooning Drawing," from 1953, or Harold Eugene Edgerton's footage of nuclear explosions, a kind of self-portrait of "Death, the destroyer of worlds," in the phrase attributed to Robert Oppenheimer.
What had been "billed as portraits of life," Lepore writes, "were, in fact, portraits of death".
He returns with portraits of deaths foretold — shrunken slivers of ice where mighty glaciers once stood.
He returns with portraits of deaths foretold shrunken slivers of ice where mighty glaciers once stood.
SIX years ago, when BOB DYLAN played the first New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival after Hurricane Katrina, his set list pointedly featured "High Water (For Charley Patton)," a harrowingly vivid portrait of flooding, death and exodus.
It isn't quite We Need to Talk About Donald, but Lionel Shriver's satirical dystopia, The Mandibles (Harper Collins £16.99), paints a chilling and timely portrait of the death of the American dream.
Along the way there are many details common to other Taylor works, but as it sweeps through changing imagery of one man's life and observation, of war, pain and community, and as it finally moves into a portrait of blessed death, it reveals itself to be like no other work in the Taylor repertory.
Fenton's memorial photograph is a portrait of absence, of death without the dead.
