Forgotten Faces: A Window Into Our Immigrant Past (Forgotten Faces - America's Lost History)

Forgotten Faces - A Window Into Our Immigrant Past reveals, for the first time, lost American history encapsulated in a beautiful but neglected art form. Forgotten Faces is the first book to explore memorial portraiture as a distinctive art form and acknowledge its contribution to our country’s valued history. In doing so, it reveals a never-before-published photo-panorama of American immigration at the turn of the twentieth century.

Forgotten Faces presents a first-ever collection of over 350 well-preserved photo-ceramic memorial portraits. The beginning of a series titled, Forgotten Faces – America’s Lost History, it demonstrates how a similarly beautiful collection of memorial portraits awaits discovery and exhibition from every major city in the United States.

Photo-Ceramic memorial portraits are photographs of the deceased mounted directly on their tombstones. They are made of ceramics the quality of the finest china but made to last outdoors for centuries. This edition now includes 10 pages of color plates - including rare images of immigrants from 28 different nations. It includes examples from Colma, California’s historic Holy Cross and Italian cemeteries as well as other U.S. and European locations.

Forgotten Faces details the technology, history and cultural influence of memorial portraits as both art and artifact. Forgotten Faces alerts readers to the fact these treasured artifacts are vanishing from our heritage and recommends methods for documenting them before they disappear.