Open Culture on the thankfully brief popularity of post-mortem photography (photos of the recently deceased as if they were merely sleeping):
The 19th century witnessed the birth of photography. And, before too long, Victorian society found important applications for the new medium — like memorializing the dead. A recent post on a Dutch version of National Geographic notes that “Photographing deceased family members just before their burial was enormously popular in certain Victorian circles in Europe and the United States. Although adults were also photographed, it was mainly children who were commemorated in this way. In a period plagued by unprecedented levels of infant mortality, post-mortem pictures often provided the only tangible memory of the deceased child.”
