Bearded Dave

It's a blistering 75ºF outside and today we talk about death. Isn't it funny sometimes how all of a sudden one topic comes to the forefront of your day? The first thing I found was this blog that had been started in conjuction with an exhibition of the Justice and Police Department Archives and the Historic Houses Trust. Sadly, it's not very well maintained, but there are some haunting, surreal vintage crime scene photos on it {NSFW & not for the squeamish). You could take one picture and write an entire book about what happened.

The really amazing thing, however, are the vintage mugshots. The are intense! There are some more pictures and background info on TrAcEy's blog. Apparently, those mugshots were taken by the New South Wales Police Department photographers between 1910 and 1930. There are approximately 2500 of them and you can see a handful of them on the Historic Houses Trust's searchable website. What strikes me about those portraits is how sharp and clear they are.

To round this up, we have Slate reviewing a book called Dissection, which is essentially a collection of, well, vintage photographs from the dissection room. Here's a snip from the review:

This lost genre of photographs, Edmonson explains, dates roughly from 1880 to 1930. The images, which were taken at medical schools across the country, generally display groups of student dissectors posing with their cadavers. At times, the students—who are mostly male but occasionally female—are actively dissecting. Not surprisingly, many of the cadavers look less like human beings than pieces of meat. But in other images, especially those involving the skeletons that students used to help identify the bones and other landmarks in their cadavers, the dead are in unnatural positions, either by themselves or with students. A cadaver smokes a pipe; skeletons play cards; skeletons hug their dissectors; skeletons are even propped up to appear as though they are dissecting sleeping students.