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Album Angels: Parent-Child Relations as Reflected in 19th-Century Photos, Made After the Death of a Child

Henk van Setten
Volume 26, Number 4, Spring 1999

Death is back as a popular theme. This is shown by, among other trends, many restorations of old cemeteries which are being revalued as cultural monuments. In the Netherlands, it was even shown by the appearance of a magazine about death and dying, titled Doodgewoon ("Dead Normal").1 From reticence, we seem to have reverted to a much older willingness to show and face images of death, as was recently demonstrated again by a 1998 Haarlem museum exposition of Dutch "death portraits" from c. 1500 to the present.2

When looking at children and death in a wider historical context,3 one needs to discuss two main aspects of this relation: in the first place the confrontation of children with death, in daily reality, in education, in children's literature, etc.;4 and in the second place the confrontation of parents with the death of a child. Here I will restrict myself to this second aspect, focusing on one specific and not yet systematically researched source: the photos that 19th-century parents often had made of a dead child.

An important question here is whether such a source can tell us something about the development of parent-child relations. Or does it mainly tell us something about changing attitudes regarding death? Using Norbert Elias's sociological figuration theory as a general framework, we can start from the following assumption: After about 1800 in Western culture, the physical aspects of death were gradually made more invisible (the moving of cemeteries out of town centers, the increasing use of mortuaries, etc.). This coincided with a formalization of mourning and associated behaviour (the Victorian black mourning dress codes, etc.).5 But after the mid-20th century, mourning behaviour started to show a development from Fremdzwang (externally formalized) to Selbstzwang (structured by internalization); gradually, the fixed rituals began to leave room for more personal, sensitive modes of expression (which still did require some degree of individual discipline).6 The period between 1800 and 1960 apparently was some kind of transitional period in which emotions related to death and dying were experienced as more intensively in need of control - maybe even as threatening. Therefore, especially in the 19th century, the formal and collective structuring of such emotions carried much weight.

Parental sorrow

An intensified awareness becomes clear when looking at the attention people gave to the death of children. Both from the content and the number of sources, one gets the impression that in the early 19th century - at least in the Netherlands, and possibly everywhere in Western culture - people started rather suddenly to give much more attention to the comforting of parents who lost a child than had been the case in the centuries before.

Poets and preachers of course always had considered the death of children an important theme. In classic Dutch poetry, there are many examples of poets writing about the loss of their own child, such as Vondel with his Constantijntje in the 17th century, or Poot with his Jakoba in the 18th century. Two things can be noted here. In the first place, such classic poets associated their sorrow with simple, vivid, bittersweet recollections of the child when it was still alive, happy and playing. Secondly, they showed a religious acceptance. For them, God knew best: after all, in heaven the child would be better off than it had been in this earthly valley of tears.7 A separate religious motive, found more frequently in orthodox Calvinist sermons and preachers' treatises, was that dying children (who were supposed to have found and accepted God on their death beds) constituted an example for all others. Apart from various theological nuances, the religious motive remained a constant factor until the mid-20th century, even while in the course of the 19th century it started to get new channels of expression (in printed invitations to pray, in burial announcements, etc.).

One striking characteristic of 17th-18th century Dutch expressions of grief about dead children is that from our modern viewpoint, the almost inevitable feelings of parental guilt seem to be largely missing as a clearly recognizable dimension. We actually find very little traces of the "if I just had been able to do this or to prevent that..." feelings that commonly and understandably may haunt modern parents after the loss of a child. Maybe the lack of this dimension had something to do with the prevailing, almost fatalistic Calvinist concept in the 17thÐ18th century Netherlands of a God deciding all in advance without man being able to influence His decisions. Certainly some aspects of guilt had been more visible in a previous Catholic era. An example is the so-called "Brugues miracle" from the 15th century: the story of a mother who in 1407 sat weeping for three days on the grave of her not-yet baptized baby, until finally by a miracle the infant was heard crying and recovered alive.8 In such pre-Reformation popular stories, the dimensions of the mother's grief and her guilt for not having baptized the child in time could both play a role. In the 17th and 18th century, the guilt motif did not find such a clear form.

The early 19th century in the Netherlands showed a sudden explosion of literature about dead children, not just by poets and preachers, but also friends of the family, relations, even the parents themselves.9 It seems like suddenly everyone considered the death of a child an occasion for comforting writings (often, but not always, in the form of poetry). For example, when in 1823 the ordinary middle-class Dutchman W.H. Suringar lost his little daughter Anna, both a family friend and a nephew had a brochure printed with comforting words for the mourning parents.10 Why didn't they just write a letter, why did they have such personal words of comfort printed? Maybe because third parties might be comforted by their words just as well (which also may have helped to remind the bereaved parents of the fact that they were, at least, not the only parents suffering such a loss). Maybe another reason to have such words of comfort printed was simply the desire to demonstrate in public that one shared the expected, modern kind of grief, and knew how to cope with it in the proper way.

Apart from such individual 'comfort' brochures (and perhaps partly because of them), commercial publishers from about 1840 started to recognize bereaved parents as a specific market. The general religious literature intended to comfort bereaved parents soon grew into a large number of publications such as Onze kinderen in den hemel: troostwoorden voor treurende ouders ("Our Children in Heaven: Comforting Words for Grieving Parents").11

An aside: in the present we still do have both types of writings about the death of children, the individual and the general kind. Poetry and autobiographical documents by bereaved parents now show much more strongly the motifs of being powerless and of refusal to accept,12 while in the more general type of comforting literature the religious motif has now often been replaced with all kinds of psychological advice about how to cope with grief.

Background

Why was this attention to the grief caused by the loss of a child intensified in the early 19th century? Some hypotheses appear easy to disprove, such as the idea that losing a child might have become more difficult to bear at that point in time because it had become a less common occurrence. For in the early 1800s, the death rate of children in West-European countries was still fairly constant, about 20% of all children dying before their sixth year; the actual decrease of this death rate seems not to have started for pre-schoolers until the 1870s, and for infants as late as about 1900.13

The growing attention to the death of children in the early 1800s therefore seems in the first place not related directly to social-economic or medical factors, but possibly related to a context of changing mentality. The two most important aspects here may be (a) the bourgeois family ideal, at that time intensively propagated (and in gradually widening circles also realized), which aimed at conscious cultivation of emotional relations;14 and (b) a changing perspective of the future, which became more and more based on concrete and rational expectations. In fact the first aspect is related to the Romantic movement, and the second one to the Enlightenment movement. The period around 1800 was the period when both these cultural movements fused into one bourgeois world view, a view that was at the same time essentially sentimental and rational, and which in various forms (Biedermeier Germany, Victorian England) would largely dominate the 19th century. And the death of a child could shake this modern bourgeois vision in the depth of its roots: as far as the parents were concerned, such a death shook them in both their modern-rational future expectations, and in their modern-sentimental emotions.

Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century writers, such as Vondel, had in a similar context associated their sorrow mainly with recollections of the dead child as it had been, happy and playing. But now, in the early 19th century, a new dimension was added to this. Besides the old association with the child as it had been, the sorrow now often was also associated with the child as it should have become. A new poetic image became increasingly popular here: that of "the flower, nipped in the bud." Implicitly or explicitly, people now referred to a future which had not been realized, and to a relationship that was cruelly and untimely torn apart. Parents tried more and more to keep alive this relationship (and even that future) across the grave. This is not only shown by the development of grave monuments for children,15 but for example also by the increasingly anthropocentric concept of "heaven." More and more, heaven was represented as a place were one's dead children continued to live, awaiting the final reunion with their parents.

This heavenly continuation of life was sometimes imagined in a very concrete way. A striking example is that of an American preacher who in the 1850s, quite in earnest, discussed the question whether dead children would continue going to school in heaven: he felt this might indeed be the case.16 In the Netherlands, printed "prayer cards" for the deceased (a new burial tradition emerging among mid-19th century Catholics) reflected a similar attitude. In the case of a child's death, often these cards did not ask the reader to pray for the child's soul, as they would have done in the case of an adult; instead, they simply announced that the child was now happy in heaven, where the child would now be praying for her parents, brothers, and sisters still left behind on this earth.17

Photography

Nineteenth-century parents often conserved the remembrance of a lost child in very sentimental ways. It was not unusual for a mother to carry a string of hair from such a child on her own body for the rest of her life; Victorian culture even provided "hair artists" who specialized in processing the hair of the dead to this end.18 One of the better ways to conserve the memory, a portrait, was traditionally limited to the higher social classes. But from mid-century, after the advent of photography, this gradually began to change.

Of course in the very first place photos could serve to record the whole family, almost as physical evidence of modern-bourgeois family ideology: one of the earliest Dutch family photos (1844) shows mother behind the tea-pot, father quasi-smoking his pipe, and one of the children holding a picture book. Shutter-times in the mid-nineteenth century were so long, that for the making of a photo people had to sit completely motionless - sometimes for over a minute. Even when such extremely long shutter-times were no longer necessary, photographing moving objects in the beginning often went wrong. As a result, many 19th-century family photos do picture the adults quite sharply, but the children more vague, moving, sometimes ghostlike. Thus a technical limitation created its own symbolic representation: for such photos show adults as definitive, firmly fixed, while they represent children as still having something temporary, fluid about them.

Because of such technical limitations, and because until 1900 the less well-off often had no family photos made at all, when a child died sometimes there existed no good portrait. In such a case, the parents could decide to have such a portrait made after the child's death. This in fact was the continuation of an age-old tradition: ever since early modern times, artists had painted pictures of laid-out dead children. Such paintings were by necessity ordered only by the few parents who could afford them. But photography was quite a bit cheaper than painting, and thus between 1845 and about 1900, professional photographers made large numbers of photos of dead children, to serve as a remembrance for the parents.

Initially, photographic equipment was fairly unportable, and because a postmortem photo had to be made as soon as possible, parents sometimes simply walked the streets to the photographer's studio with the dead child in their arms. The resulting photos were intended to be carried in a medallion or a small case, or in a later phase to be kept in an album; sometimes they even were fixed on the grave-stone. According to Aries, in the second half of the 19th century "every family album" did contain such photos of dead children; in a literal sense this may be somewhat exaggerated, but the trend certainly did exist. Many 19th-century photography collections and archives include this kind of photo.19 Until their rediscovery a decade ago, the existence of such photos was not widely known because they were seldom shown in public. One of the publications that revived the attention to such 'postmortem photography' was a 1990 publication by Stanley Burns, which included a good and what seems to me fairly representative selection of American 19th-century photos of dead children.20 Recently, various photo history websites on the Internet have started to show similar photos.21

Looking at such photos, we may divide them into three different groups: first, photos that were entirely in line with traditional forms and motives; second, photos that more emphatically represented a modern-bourgeois family ideology; and finally, photos that mainly seem to be in line with the ritualization of mourning behaviour. Of course it is not always possible to make a clear distinction between these three groups, but let me try to describe each one of them briefly.

Traditional, modern and ritual

The 'traditional' photos of dead children simply were no more than a photographic variant of the paintings and medallions that people already had made in the 18th century (and before). Usually this was an uncomplicated portrait of the child on his or her deathbed, although the photographers did not always succeed in suggesting the same angelic serenity that the painters of earlier times had been able to suggest. Sometimes this kind of photo made use of well-known religious symbols: for example, by placing a small angel's or saint's statue beside the corpse of the child. Infants were often shown with flowers in their folded hands, and girls adorned with a garland of flowers; this was not just in line with a pictorial tradition, but also with an age-old and, especially in the countryside, still existing custom of burying virgins and young children dressed in white and with flowers.

'Modern' pictures in the same period (the second half of the 19th century) were quite different. Just reproducing an image of the dead child was not enough here. This kind of photo also tried to capture somehow the parents' grief for the child, for the lost relation and the lost future. In this kind of photo, often the two parents posed together with the little corpse. If this was an older child, it was often placed in the father's lap; if it was a baby or toddler, usually the mother was holding it. Here was expressly shown a relationship, a reality that had been broken by death.

A similar effect was created by a subcategory of photos that one might call "puppet" photography. Here, the photographer had taken trouble to create the illusion (by dressing up the dead child, opening its eyes, positioning it on a chair, etc.) that the child was still alive. For the present-day viewer, the result often looks rather painful, cruel or outright gruesome: the whole entourage only stresses the fact that the child so obviously looks like, and is, a corpse. The question why some people actually wanted to create a just-like-life effect is not answered easily. Aries supposed this was done because people started to experience death more and more as an unbearable thing, but to me this analysis seems incomplete. Among the many factors playing a role here, a main reason might of course have been the simple desire to produce exactly the kind of portrait that the parents regretted not having made during the child's lifetime; another factor may have been, for example, that in these early days of photography, people still expected the camera to produce effects that in fact a conventional painter could have created much better.

To the 'modern' photos also belongs a category that pictures the dead child together with his-or-her toys: a little cart, a doll, a ball... On the one hand, such photos fit into the classical kind of grief of parents for their child as it had been once (as in the 17th-century Vondel poetry); but on the other hand, the toys in the photograph create an individualizing and emotionalizing, helpless-sentimental effect. This emphasized sentiment was in fact not very different from what we see nowadays in the children's section of some cemeteries: child graves with a rain-sodden teddybear or a favourite bright red plastic truck placed on top of them.

Finally, the 'ritual' kind of photos. In such pictures, the central issue seems to have been not the remembrance of the child itself, but rather the occasion of its death: a remembrance - and sometimes, one may suppose, also proof and evidence - of grief, mourning and burial. Sometimes this was quite literally the central motive, for example if on the photograph the child in its open coffin was just in the background, the foreground all showing a mass of flowery wreaths and other paraphernalia. Many photos that primarily have the parents exposing their mourning dress can hardly have served as a remembrance of the lost child; rather, they must have been a physical evidence of grief, more specifically of the socially correct way in which the parents had been able to formalize it. In a few cases, such photos even may have served as a half-conscious way of demonstrative self-justification. For example, Burns (1990) shows one 1850s photo of mourning parents posing with their dead child and a small table: and on that table, quite theatrically, the bottles of medicine that were used in vain...

Documentary value

Tentatively, we may say a little about the value of such 19th-century photos of dead children. Regardless of the category that they belong to, some of them have a clear, in a few cases even surprising, documentary value. For example, they may make very concrete the reality of illnesses and epidemics like cholera (an illness that in the 19th century especially affected children). They also may show the inadequacy of medical and general child care at the time: for example, I have seen photos that suggest that infants may have died from dehydration, a situation that often was not sufficiently recognized at the time. They also strikingly document birth mortality - such as the photos, a category by itself, that show a mother and baby, both having died during childbirth, laid out side-by-side or even placed together in a single coffin.

On another level, we may for example see that mentally or physically handicapped children were sometimes photographed after death in an apparently loving, remembering way; this may indicate that the often-heard impression that in the past parents were hardly able to love handicapped children is an over-generalization. It is also interesting to see how brothers and sisters were confronted very directly with the death of one of their own: some photos show living children (of various ages) posing beside the dead one. This touches the topic of the presence of death in education, a topic which I will not consider here now. Of course some photos also demonstrate how death was present in daily life, for example by showing how a dead child was laid out not in a mortuary, but in the family's living room.

Conclusion

Let us get back to the initial question. Can this kind of source tell us something about the development of parent-child relations? Or, at least, about how people wanted parent-child relations to be seen? Or do such photos tell us more about changes in civilization, in ways of handling death? To answer such questions, a more systematic selection and analysis of the material will be necessary than can be presented here. Let me limit myself to a personal impression based on researching this kind of photo in some published and unpublished collections and archives.

If we look at the three subgroups of photos differentiated above, we see some shifts. Over time, the category of 'traditional' photos of dead children remained, in relative numbers, more or less constant. Most photos of dead children belonged to this 'traditional' category. Maybe this kind of photo was also the category that was, more than the others, a sinking cultural asset (meaning that its occurrence was gradually moving, by processes of imitation and distinction, from the higher to the lower classes). The second kind of photo, the 'modern' emotional photo of dead children, initially appeared a little more frequently than the third category, the 'ritual' photo. But from about 1870-1880 this seemed to change, the 'ritual' way of photographing dead children becoming relatively more dominant, while 'modern' photos directly revealing (intended or unintended) emotional content became more scarce. After about 1900, further development becomes difficult to trace because from that moment amateur photographers (often the parents themselves) started to take over from professional photographers. In most cases, such private amateur photographs will not have found their way to archives or public collections.

Let me add that even today, some parents do photograph their child after its death. The 'ritual' approach in photographing dead children, in the coffin or surrounded with flowers, is as a formal tradition still found among the poor in some cultures, such as in the favelas (slums) of Latin-American cities. But in fact all over the world, bereaved parents may still try to do something similar, be it in a more private, less formal way. In the Netherlands, I interviewed some parents who made pictures of a dead child; this was done most often (but not exclusively) in the case of stillborn babies, where there is no alternative if one wants a picture. Some parents told me the making of these photos had helped them to cope; but others could not bear the direct, unveiled way in which the photos showed death, and in disappointment had destroyed them as soon as they saw the result.22

To get back to the 'modern' group of 19th century photos, these appear to support the impression that sentimentalization of parent-child relations was, ideologically speaking, at a high tide in the brief period between c. 1850-1880. Whether these relations at that time were also more sentimental in actual life is, of course, another question. But at least one can say that some parents unmistakably valued having the relationship with their lost child pictured in such a way, be it naive or posed, and that the picture referred to emotions and sentiments (and was able to call such emotions and sentiments back to mind). This category of photos was most evidently intended to keep alive something of the parent-child relation beyond the grave.

That in the last decades of the 19th century, this way of photographing dead children appears to have made place for the more 'ritual' approach, might be an illustration of a more general development: the gradual hiding of the physical aspects of death, in the context of a civilization process. Put simply, it is as if mid-19th century photos showed some glimpses of modern emotions, while in the late 19th century formalization and self-control came to prevail over such emotion. Emotions went underground; and by itself, this shift to keep feelings more private also fitted in the development of modern-bourgeois family culture.

a query

As you will have noticed above, the exact reasons and motifs behind 19th century "dead children" photography remain still largely a matter of conjecture. Public archives do have such photos bearing witness to the custom. We also have various documents (diaries, letters, etc.) of 19th century parents describing their sorrow at the loss of a child. But what was not found so far are some instances where both universes overlap, that is, where we can match this kind of photo with a written account by parents about making or keeping them (which might help us to better understand the role of such photos). It cannot be ruled out that a few private family archives might contain very important material here. If you happen to know of 19th century autobiographical documents referring to making or keeping photos of a dead child, please contact the author:
Dr. Henk van Setten, Philosophy and History of Education,
University Nijmegen, PO Box 9104,
6500 HE Nijmegen, Netherlands.
Email: [email protected]

NOTES BELOW

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General note:
The 19th century photos illustrating this article are all from the collections of, copyrighted by, and reproduced here with permission of, the Prentenkabinet photo archive of the University of Leiden, in the Netherlands.

1. Doodgewoon. Tijdschrift over de dood (1994-1995). Actually, this magazine turned out to be a short-lived one: the general public was not quite as ready for this initiative as the editors had expected.
2. Illustrated catalogue of this exposition: B.C. Sliggers (ed.), Naar het lijk: het Nederlandse doodsportret 1500-heden. Zutphen 1998.
3. This article is part of a wider ongoing research into the theme of death in the context of childhood, family and education since the early 1800s. A previous (Dutch-language) version of this article was published in N. Bakker et al., Kind en cultuur in opvoeding en onderwijs. Bijdragen aan de Zevende Pedagogendag. Groningen 1996, pp. 117-127.
4. We already have many studies about death as an educating theme in 19th century children's literature: see for example Brigitte Beate Elbe, Das Todesmotiv in der englischen Kinderliteratur des 19. Jahrhunderts. Inauguraldissertation, Bonn 1990.
5. This specific Elias-based interpretation of mourning behaviour is derived from Herman Franke, De dood in het leven van alledag: twee eeuwen rouwadvertenties en openbare strafvoltrekkingen in Nederland. 's-Gravenhage 1985. For an English translation of Norbert Elias' main work †ber den Prozess der Zivilisation (1939-1976), see Norbert Elias, The civilizing Process, Oxford 1978.
6. An important exponent of the development towards more personal mourning behaviour was Mitford's criticism of the commercial undertaking industry in America: Jessica Mitford, The American Way of Death (1963). The Dutch translation of this book got to four reprints within the year (1964). How attitudes regarding mourning and burial were personalized in the 1960s and 1970s is demonstrated in contemporary publications such as P. Hofstede, Tot onze diepe droefheid. Een documentaire over de dood. Baarn 1970.
7. Over all ages, this has been probably the most frequent motif. See Rudolf Dekker, Uit de schaduw in 't grote licht. Kinderen in egodocumenten van de Gouden eeuw tot de Romantiek. Amsterdam 1995, pp. 201-222.
8. Ruud Spruit, De dood onder ogen: een cultuurgeschiedenis van sterven, begraven, cremeren en rouw. Houten 1986, p. 25.
9. For an example of a father publishing an emotional account of the death of his child, see B.H. Lulofs, Uitboezemingen bij de ziekte en het overlijden van ons teedergeliefd, eenigst kindje, Constantia Wilhelmina, gestorven den 31 Julij 1818, in den ouderdom van bijna negen maanden. Groningen 1818.
10. The family friend was J.K. Nierstrasz, who wrote Het ontslapen kind aan deszelfs vader: toegeeigend aan mijn' vriend W.H. Suringar. s.l., 1823. The family relation was W.H. Suringar, who wrote Aan mynen neef W. H. Suringar by den dood van zyn jongsten kind Anna Carolina Johanna. s.l., 1823.
11. J.J.L. ten Kate, (ed.), Onze kinderen in den hemel: troostwoorden voor treurende ouders. Leeuwarden 1860 (reprint 1875).
12. Various examples of 20th century Dutch poetry mourning dead children (by writers such as Eybers, Vasalis, de Jonge) can be found in: 'Kinderen die dood gaan', in Willem Wilmink (ed.), Kinderen. Meer dan honderd gedichten over hun wondere wereld. Amsterdam 1994, pp. 131-145.
13. Statistics in Michel Poulain and Dominique Tabutin, 'La mortalitŽ aux jeunes ages en Europe et en AmŽrique du Nord du XIXe a nos jours', in: La mortalitŽ des enfants dans le monde et dans l'histoire. Liege 1980, pp. 119-157.
14. One of the first studies detailing this early-19th century rise of a new 'emotional' family ideology was Edward Shorter, The Making of the Modern Family. New York 1975. For the propagation of the 'modern' family ideology in the early-1800s Netherlands, see Bernard Kruithof, Zonde en deugd in domineesland. Nederlandse protestanten en problemen van opvoeding, 17e tot 20e eeuw. Dissertation Amsterdam 1990, pp. 60-95.
15. See Philippe Aries, Het beeld van de dood. Nijmegen 1987, pp. 223f.
16. Colleen McDannell and Bernhard Lang, Heaven: A History. New Haven 1988, p. 268.
17. A nice example is a 1908 "prayer card" for a six-year-old girl, which presented (as was done often) the dead child addressing her parents and siblings, admonishing them not to cry, as she was praying for reunion. Reproduced in Albert van der Zeijden, 'Gevoelsuitingen op Brabantse bidprentjes (1840-1986)', in Brabants Heem 45 (1993), pp. 138-149.
18. A necklace made by London "hair artists" from the plaited hair of a boy who died in 1847 at the age of six, is shown and described in Lou Taylor, Mourning Dress: A Costume and Social History. London 1983, pp. 242-243.
19. Not only children, but also many adults were photographed post-mortem in the 19th century. For a short general overview of this kind of photography, see Anja Krabben, 'Schone Slapers', in Doodgewoon 1:1994, #2, pp. 11-15.
20. Stanley B. Burns, Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America. New York 1990. His selection of postmortem photos seems reasonably representative to me in respect of the adult-child numbers: indeed a relatively large part of 'memorial photography' was of children. As for the pictures themselves, photos similar to these American ones can be found in Dutch and German archives. Burns's was not the first photo history to include postmortem portraits: a well-known earlier example is Michael Lesy, Wisconsin Death Trip. New York 1973 (reprinted 1991).
21. Several Internet websites now offer general information about 19th century photography in relation to death, and some of them show very illustrative examples of photos of dead children:
Ben Mattison, The Social Construction of the American Daguerreotype Portrait, 1839-1860. http://www.users.interport.net/~ben42/daguerre/index.html This illustrated online Vassar thesis gives a well-documented general background for the social use of photography in the US in the mid-19th century. See chapter 3, 'The Mourning Portrait'.
Dan Meinwald, Memento Mori: Death and Photography in Nineteenth Century America. http://cmp1.ucr.edu/terminals/memento_mori/ This annotated website combines an informative text with several relevant examples of post-mortem photographs.
Jay Ruby, Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America. http://wsrv.clas.virginia.edu/~ds8s/jay/jay.html This website shows various examples of photos of dead children, including some that clearly demonstrate what I defined here as the 'modern' and the 'ritual' categories.
22. Interviews held in Amsterdam, 1995, in a small and not really representative group of parents who lost a child in the years before (approached through primary schools and day care institutions).

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