Lust for Life
The ‘Graveyard School’ artists of the Victorian Gothic Revival were the spin-doctors of Death.
By the mid-1800s, the Industrial Revolution was driving global change at an unprecedented rate. New technologies were rapidly changing the human way of life. In times of turmoil and uncertainty, people often seek solace in the certain and permanent. As Benjamin Franklin famously pointed out, “ in this world, nothing can be said to be certain, except death …and taxes.”
To begin with, photography was mainly studio-based and was used either to document people and places, or to ape the role of painting. In Fading Away, a famous early photograph by Henry Peach Robinson, the models have been arranged and lit in much the same way as sitters for a painting, except the composition has been captured by chemical reactions, not the brushwork of a painter. The technique may be new, but the visual language is in keeping with the Romantic sentiment of the time.
The young girl is dying and her two companions, perhaps mother and sister, attend to her. The older woman has broken off from her reading, sensing that the end is drawing near. A man, the father or perhaps physician, stands with his back to the scene, looking out of the window where dark stormy clouds are gathering.
