Memorial photography, that is.
This is easily one of the largest collections of memorial photographs I've ever seen online.
Memorial photography... photographing the deceased in their coffins or on their deathbeads as a final portrait of sorts.... was actually a fairly mainstream practice in America and some parts of Europe in the 19th and early 20th centuries. (But despite what the movie The Others may have intimated, it never really caught on in Britain.)
A lot of the subjects of memorial photography were children. Cameras weren't always the commonplace family possession that they are now, and having oneself photographed was considered a special occasion. However, child mortality was much higher a hundred years ago, especially in infancy. Many never made it to see their first formal family portrait. Memorial photography was, in a way, necessary to preserve the reality of their short lives; years into the future, a photograph might be the only evidence that the child had existed at all. In other words, it wasn't considered morbid, but a legitmate expression of grief and an attempt to ease the finality of the loss.
Paul's collection is especially well-stocked with the corpses of infants and kids, trussed up in frills and bows and bonnets and posed on couches or in permabulators. One exqusitely creepy photo features a pair of children standing rigidly by the corpse of their recently expired sibling. I guess mom and dad wanted one last picture of the kids all together. Not to be outdone, other bereaved parents insisted on photographing their dead children with open eyes, and some quick thinkers managed to beat the clock by several days, commissioning "Dying in His Mother's Arms" portraits when the child's death became utterly inevitable. Gotta wonder if the kids invovled were lucid enough to figure out what was happening.
Memorial photography fell out of fashion when tragic and premature deaths became more preventable with the advancement of modern medicine, vaccines, pediatrics, hygiene, and a general improvement in the sciences of health and longevity. Modern people, much less familiar and comfortable with death and dying, tend to regard these photographs as pretty gruesome. That was never their intention. They're well and truly a reflection of their times, and that's exactly what makes them so damn interesting.
