“Fading Away presents an image of mortality that can be viewed alternately as an incriminating paradigm of Victorian bathos and the nineteenth-century cult of the beautiful death, or as an eerie visualizing of Roland Barthes’s solemn pronouncement that death is the eidos of photography." Brian Lukacher, "Powers of Sight: Robinson, Emerson and the Polemics of Pictorial Photography, ” in Pictorial Effect, Naturalistic Vision: The Photographs and Theories of Henry Peach Robinson and Peter Henry Emerson, ed. Ellen Handy (Norfolk, Va.: Chrysler Museum, 1994), 32.
