Photography owes much of its early flourishing to death. Not in images depicting the aftermath of violent crimes or industrial accidents. Instead, through quiet pictures used to comfort grieving ...

Cabinet photo, circa 1905. | Courtesy of the Thanatos Archive. Used with permission. Identifying information provided where known. Some sense of the difficulties of postmortem photography can be ...

During a preservation survey of Stripes’ photo collection in 2018, archives staff found the 4x5 negatives from the late 1940s and early 1950s to be suffering the most from this preservation issue.