Small Deaths

Author:  Kate Breakey

Introduction by A. D. Coleman

Southwestern & Mexican Photography Collection Series, The Wittliff Collections

Publisher:  The University of Texas Press, 2001

168 pp., 81 color photos

Price:  Hardcover:  $65.00

 

 

 

 

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 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." Since 1980, Kate Breakey's photography has appeared in over thirty one-woman exhibitions and in over thirty group exhibitions in the United States, Australia, Japan, and France. It is also held in numerous public collections. The Wittliff Collections hold the major collection of Breakey’s work.