Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America

With the widespread use of the camera, nearly everyone could afford a post-mortem portrait, and for the next half-century these portraits were a mainstay of America's commercial culture. Included here are many of the finest examples of post-mortem photography with extensive notations and writings by Dr. Burns on this neglected facet of photographic history. "We take great pains to have miniatures of deceased persons agreeable and satisfactory, and they are often so natural as to seem, even to the artists, in a quiet sleep."--advertisement, 1846.