Book contents
- Still Shakespeare and the Photography of Performance
- Still Shakespeare and the Photography of Performance
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: ‘Leave Not a Rack Behind’
- Part I Photographing Performers
- Part II Iconography, Photography, and Hamlet
- Chapter 4 ‘Too Much of Water’: Ophelia, Photography, Dissolution
- Chapter 5 ‘Poor Yorick’: The Photograph as Memento Mori
- Epilogue
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter 4 - ‘Too Much of Water’: Ophelia, Photography, Dissolution
from Part II - Iconography, Photography, and Hamlet
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2019
- Still Shakespeare and the Photography of Performance
- Still Shakespeare and the Photography of Performance
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: ‘Leave Not a Rack Behind’
- Part I Photographing Performers
- Part II Iconography, Photography, and Hamlet
- Chapter 4 ‘Too Much of Water’: Ophelia, Photography, Dissolution
- Chapter 5 ‘Poor Yorick’: The Photograph as Memento Mori
- Epilogue
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The final two chapters offer different kinds of case study, examining specific, much-repeated compositions across the whole history of photography from the nineteenth century to the present. This chapter analyses the legacy in photographs of John Everett Millais’ painting Ophelia (1851), with a focus on the representation of women’s bodies in representations of Ophelia’s death by drowning in Hamlet. I look at works by Gregory Crewdson, Tom Hunter, Ana Mendieta, Toshiko Okanoue, Francesca Woodman, and Man Ray. I argue that photographs have contributed to the pathologising of Ophelia as a ‘complex’ or diagnosis, and as a means of representing female distress as an aesthetic pleasure.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Still Shakespeare and the Photography of Performance , pp. 149 - 191Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2019