The Horror Zine
Three brothers
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The Morbidly Fascinating Page

The Morbidly Fascinating Page

This Month's Subject:

Images from Sleeping Beauty II

Stanley B. Burns, MD

FROM THE MORBID ARCHIVES:

Famous Deaths
Dissections
Early Fake Ghost Photos
Bone Church
Black Dahlia
Permanent Halloween Costumes
Dr. Ochi
Flesh-Eating Bacteria

Everyone has heard about the Sleeping Beauty Series from the Burns Archive Libraries.

Now The Horror Zine lets you glimpse into Sleeping Beauty II, the second in a series of three books.

ALL IMAGES ON THIS PAGE ARE FROM THE BOOK "SLEEPING BEAUTY II"

Man lies next to deceased wife (below):

Man and dead wife

Double funeral:

Double Funeral

The final moments in her son's life:

Dying son

Grown man:

Grown man

Elderly woman:

Elderly woman

Child propped on chair:

Child on chair

Man in white gloves with elderly parents:

Man in white gloves

 

More Victorian Memorial Photography (not from Sleeping Beauty books) HERE

Sleeping Beauty II: Grief, Bereavement and the Family in Memorial Photography HERE

Memorial photography was a method to deal with grief in Victorian times. People were not usually photographed in life, so their loved ones wanted a memorial: a last look.

It was a way to honor and cherish their loved ones after death, to have a lasting memory. Death from disease was common.

The proprietor and curator of the Burns Archive, a large collection of early medical and 19th-century documentary photography in New York, Stanley Burns and his daughter, Elizabeth, have produced a sumptuous volume of beautifully reproduced postmortem photographs, expanding on his 1991 volume, Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America.

Photographs from 15 countries, ranging from the earliest daguerreotypes to present-day color snapshots, show that since the invention of photography survivors have sought to fix their memory of deceased loved ones. These disturbing and strangely beautiful images depict children and adults, famous people and those buried en masse, as well as advertising photographs for a mortuary, a World War I German grave marker, and an Afghan hound in its satin-lined casket.

With essays and picture titles in both French and English, this book is comprehensive and unique. Highly recommended for photohistory collections and those dealing with anthropology, sociology, and the history of medicine.

Kathleen Collins, Bank of America Corporate Archives, San Francisco
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Below: Girl with decompostion. Many times the photographer was not immediately available.

Decomposed girl

Below: Deceased girl propped on chair

gilrl on chair

Below: poem

Poem

Below: Loss of twins

Twins