Featured Image: The Thanatos Archive’s website banner. The Archive’s mission is to “collect, preserve, and exhibit” post-mortem photographs from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in order to better understand and appreciate “an often misunderstood part of our history.”
Taking photographs of our dead loved ones is a practice we might view as morbid or inappropriate, but our ancestors had a much different perspective on images of the dead. It was during the Victorian Era that post-mortem photography reached the height of its popularity.
In my latest article for Dirge, I explore why these photographs became so popular and how the practice of post-mortem photography has not completely disappeared from our modern society. Read it here.
Trish Lundy 