Still Lives: Photography, Nostalgia, and the Child Who Has Died

Abstract

This essay examines “remembrance photography,” the practice of photographing dying or deceased infants for memorial purposes. Identifying various tropes and patterns among the photographs, it explores the motivations of families, photographers, and NILMDTS (the volunteer organization that recruits photographers to take these images), behind remembrance photography. Governing my essay is the suggestion that this practice demonstrates a profound mixture of nostalgia and irony, what I call postmodern nostalgia, that tells us as much about our current uses of photography as it does about our attitudes toward death and dying.

Keywords:

• postmodern nostalgia
• relic
• stillborn death
• postmortem photography
• trauma
• memory

Notes

1. See Stevens’ poem, “The Plain Sense of Things.”

2. See my book, Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia, pp. 200–207.

3. For a fascinating study of Victorian postmortem photographs, see Jay Ruby’s Secure the Shadow.

4. See the following articles: “After a Stillborn, A Silent Delivery Room”; “Breaking the Silence of Stillbirth”; and “Breaking the Silence and Stigma of Stillborn Births.”