LUCY SANTE: Postmortem photographs were taken in a brief interval between death and decay.

NARRATOR: Look for the photograph of a small child’s body resting on a patterned shawl. It’s second from the left.

SANTE: I mean, among the postmortems from this period I’ve seen, this is one of the most beautiful.

My name is Lucy Sante. I’m a writer. I’ve written three books about photography.

NARRATOR: In this daguerreotype the child seems almost to be floating.

SANTE: The flowers furthermore give the effect of clouds. You sense her ascending into heaven.

Many people died young in the nineteenth century. You’d see families in the registers with eighteen children, but only five of them lived.

It was an urgent mission to preserve the faces of those who had died, because many of the people who were photographed after death had not been photographed in life. This was especially so in the case of children, babies.

They always look angelic, look like they’re asleep. They don’t need to be idealized. They idealize themselves.

NARRATOR: Some modern viewers find these images a bit creepy or morbid. But that’s not how people in the 1800s would have seen them.

SANTE: There was much less squeamishness about death in the nineteenth century.

There is a way in which photography is always about death. I mean, every scene it records is not replicable in life because that snow has melted, that food has been eaten. This person has gone in one direction and that person in another.