Photographing corpses is nowadays reserved for crime scene investigations, but in the mid 19th Century taking daguerrotypes and photographs of the recently deceased was common practice. In that age before the widespread availability of cameras the deathbed photo might be the only image of a loved one that a family possessed and would be treasured as a memento. Dead people could also stay still for the long exposure times that photography then demanded. In the early Twentieth Century as portable cameras made photography more widely accessible the practice died out.

In her illustrated talk Holly Carter-Chappell will discuss the ethical issues surrounding the display of images of the dead, a notable recent example being the exhibiting of post-mortem photographs of murder victims in the controversial Jack the Ripper Museum.

Tickets £12 including a Hendrick's gin cocktail. Please click here to buy.

HOLLY CARTER-CHAPPELL
Holly Carter-Chappell is the Collections Officer at the Florence Nightingale Museum. She studied Bioarchaeology at University of Bradford, Death Studies at the Centre for Death and Society, University of Bath and Museum Studies at University College London. Her research interests include museums as spaces to facilitate public engagement with death, the medicalisation of death during the twentieth century, and the curation and display of human remains within museum contexts.