How many photographs do you have of your mother? Of your father? Of your children?
Probably hundreds, perhaps even thousands. Most of them will never be consciously looked at again. And yet their mere existence reassures us. We know they are there. Whenever we wish to remember, we can reach for them. They have become a quiet part of our lives.
Now imagine that you had exactly one photograph.
Not the most beautiful one. Not the technically best one. Simply the only one. A photograph that must preserve everything that remains of someone you loved.
There are photographs that disturb us today. Not because they are cruel, but because they come from a world whose reality we can scarcely comprehend. Anyone looking through nineteenth-century photographs will eventually encounter portraits of children who had already died. Carefully dressed, lovingly laid out, held in their mother’s arms or surrounded by their family.
To modern eyes, these images can seem strange, even unsettling. But when we judge them solely by the standards of our own time, we misunderstand their purpose.
We tend to see death in these photographs.
The parents who stood before the camera saw something entirely different.
They saw their child.
During the second half of the nineteenth century, photography was expensive and remained a luxury for many families. At the same time, infant and child mortality was frighteningly high. Diseases that can now be prevented by vaccination or treated with relatively simple medication claimed countless young lives. Many children died before their parents had ever considered visiting a photographer.
For some families, the first photograph of their child was also the last. It was taken only after the child had died.
This was the context in which post-mortem photography developed. When a child was taken from life, a photographer would sometimes be called. The child was washed, carefully dressed and laid out with dignity. In many cases, there was no serious attempt to conceal the fact of death. Something else mattered far more: the child’s face had to be preserved.
These photographs were not created out of a morbid fascination with death. They were created out of love. They were a desperate attempt to wrest one small fragment of memory from the hands of impermanence.
Many stories have grown around these historical photographs. One of the best known claims that the deceased child was often the only family member who appeared sharp because the child did not move during the long exposure. There are indeed photographs in which this impression arises. Adults, however, were also stabilised with concealed headrests or arranged in deliberately still poses to prevent motion blur.
The effect may have occurred, but it was by no means a general rule.
In any case, the technical detail is not what matters. Behind every one of these photographs were parents who loved their child just as deeply as parents do today.
It would be easy to assume that this kind of photography disappeared long ago. In reality, it still exists. Even today, photographs are created under some of the saddest circumstances imaginable. In English, the practice is usually called baby remembrance photography or bereavement photography.
In German-speaking countries, children who die during pregnancy, at birth or shortly afterwards are often called Sternenkinder — literally, “star children”. There is no exact English equivalent. The expression refers to babies who leave this world before they have had the chance to experience life beyond its very beginning.
For their parents, an entire world collapses.
It is not only a life that ends. A future disappears with that child: birthdays, first days at school, Christmas mornings, family holidays and all the ordinary moments that will never take place. It is a farewell not merely to a person, but to a future that had only just begun.
And sometimes, at precisely that moment, a photographer enters the room.
I have profound respect for the women and men who undertake this work. They do not come to create art. Nor do they come in search of perfect images. They come because they understand what a single photograph may one day mean.
They must be technically confident while becoming almost invisible. They must sense when words might offer comfort and when silence is more compassionate. They must work in a hospital room without turning grief into a photographic production. There can be few tasks in photography that demand greater sensitivity.
In the United Kingdom, the charity Remember My Baby provides professional remembrance photography to bereaved families free of charge. Trained volunteer photographers visit hospitals, hospices and, in some cases, family homes or funeral homes. They photograph babies alone or together with their parents, siblings and other family members. The resulting images are professionally edited and given to the families as a lasting remembrance.
In the United States, Now I Lay Me Down to Sleep performs similar work and also supports families and medical professionals internationally. In German-speaking Europe, the Dein-Sternenkind Foundation coordinates hundreds of volunteer photographers across Germany, Austria, German-speaking Switzerland and South Tyrol.
The names differ, but the purpose remains the same: to preserve the first and, at the same time, the final moments that a family is able to share with its child.
One thought about these photographs has stayed with me.
When the finished images are given to the parents, there can be no expectation that they will look at them immediately. Some parents want to see their child again as soon as possible. Others cannot. The pain is too great, the loss too immediate.
The photographs may remain unopened in a drawer or cupboard for months, perhaps even for years. Only when the parents find the strength to look again do they return to them.
And when they do, they are not simply looking at photographs.
They are meeting their child.
Perhaps this is why such images can become so important within the grieving process. Memory needs anchors. A piece of music. A scent. A place. Or a photograph.
The photograph cannot make the pain disappear. It cannot restore the future that was lost. But it can prevent a face from slowly fading in memory. It can give parents the certainty that their child’s features will not vanish entirely with time.
Photographers spend countless hours thinking about cameras, lenses, lighting and composition. Yet in these photographs, all of that recedes into the background. Technical skill remains necessary, but technical perfection is irrelevant. Artistic originality is irrelevant. Recognition, style and ambition are irrelevant.
What matters is the human being.
Love. Memory. And the need to preserve at least one moment that time would otherwise carry away forever.
Perhaps this is photography’s deepest purpose.
Not to produce beautiful pictures. Not to capture spectacular moments. But to place something in the path of forgetting.
A person continues to live for as long as someone remembers them. Sometimes a song helps us remember. Sometimes a story. And sometimes it is a single photograph, kept safely in an unopened envelope, waiting until the day someone finds the strength to look at it.
Not to preserve death, but to tell us that this child existed.
That this child was loved.
And that this child must never be forgotten.