NONFICTION - Sept. 3, 1995

SECURE THE SHADOW: Death and Photography in America by Jay Ruby (MIT Press: $39.95; 213 pp.) Back when death was a livelier event, deathbed portraits and death masks were customary memorials. These time-consuming artisanal activities were supplanted in the 19th Century by the mortuary or funeral photograph, a practice that even today, though little commented upon, apparently rivals amateur erotica in underground popularity, according to the testimony of anonymous photo-processors.

Twenty years ago, Susan Sontag made trenchant observations about photography’s memorious fascination with the outre and the final. Now Jay Ruby, professor of anthropology at Temple University, offers a phenomenological sociology of the topic. Purposefully eschewing the lurid and countering the morbid and quasi-apocalyptic view of Michael Lesy in the classic “Wisconsin Death Trip” (Pantheon: 1973), Ruby firmly situates death photography in the context of normal life, even documenting a 1980s vogue for photographs incorporated into tombstones.

Nothing grisly here; just a fairly academic but nonetheless fascinating history of a completely overlooked aspect of photography as well as a subject near to all of us.