Camera MortisMourning in the Thanatos Archive Lili Hamlyn (bio) sarah a. lawrence has a toy drum hanging around her neck. A drumstick is nestled in each tiny hand. She wears a paisley dress and a beaded necklace; the strap on her drum is made of the same ribbon that decorates the puffed sleeves of her dress. The girl's hair is styled into a single, coiffed curl atop her head. The image has been expertly tinted; her cheeks and lips are rosy, her dress is red and pink, the stripes on her drum crimson. But her open eyes don't meet our gaze; her stare is unfocused and blank. Sarah A. Lawrence is dead. Doubly dead. That is, not only is she dead the way anyone encountered in a very old photograph is; she was already dead by the time the image—a sixth-plate daguerreotype—was taken around 1847. This postmortem portrait is probably the only photograph ever taken of her. She is now twice memorialized: first by her parents shortly after her death and again in Stanley B. Burns's Sleeping Beauty II, a selection of postmortem [End Page 91] and mourning photographs from the Burns Archive, an extensive, private collection of early medical, postmortem, mourning, and other historic photographs, located in New York. Burns, an ophthalmologist and professor of medical humanities at NYU, founded the archive in 1977; he has published over fifty photo-historical texts, curated over a hundred exhibitions, and regularly consults as a medical, historical, and technical adviser on television and film projects, including Cinemax's The Knick and PBS's Mercy Street. My infatuation with postmortem photographs began in the months following my mother's death, when I was twenty-three years old. I found Stanley B. Burns's work by chance and was transfixed; I spent days in the British Library poring over the pages of his books. At the time, I didn't or couldn't understand that there was a relationship between my grief and the fact that I was spending hours looking at images of the dead. I was adjusting not only to loss but also to the fact that my days were no longer ordered by the duties of care. For months I had organized my life around hospital appointments, pain management, palliative care, and anticipatory grief. And then one day I no longer had to. I was exhausted, sad—and free. I didn't know what to do with myself. I had always imagined that my mother's death would cause some cathartic disintegration, or at least leave me profoundly altered, steeped in a grief so extreme I would be unable to function. In a way, I was looking forward to the deliverance of falling apart. But that deliverance never came. Instead, I planned a funeral and prepared elaborate meals I had little desire to eat. I bought scratch cards, watched cooking competitions on TV, and purchased a set of Star Wars novelty drinking straws as a gift for a visiting friend. Today I consider these my responses to grief, but at the time context was impossible. The sudden shift from caregiver to bereaved produced a kind of numb delirium: I had no idea how I really felt. Looking at postmortem photographs was my way, I now see, of keeping death close. Under the vague guise of research—what I thought I was researching I don't know—I could dwell on, luxuriate in, death. I could let it stay with me as those around me moved on. [End Page 92] Reading Sleeping Beauty II among the semi-suppressed coughs and frantic pencil scratches of fellow researchers in the British Library's capacious humanities reading room, I thought of Roland Barthes, for whom a photograph of the dead "certifies, so to speak, that the corpse is alive, as corpse: it is the living image of a dead thing." Burns's books are a procession of such corpses. The longdead transform into the recently departed, preserved at a moment when their death was new. Though I try to linger over each image, give space to each death, the figures begin to overlap and blur; tendrils of connection...