Photography, Birth and Death

Before reading this section, photographing the dead is never something that I thought much about. Looking back, it seems to me that the only photographs I've seen of dead people have been gruesome images of war and crime, usually blurred by media sources. The fact that it was acceptable practice to display photographs of corpses in homes at one point in time seems absurd to me- yet the way that this practice is explained in the book gives it a much more logical explanation.
We typically take photographs to freeze a memory, to preserve a sight that we want to be reminded of. In the text, photographs are described to have deathly qualities, mainly immobility and silence. I had never looked at photography in this way before. "Photography renders the living immobile, frozen: the living person photographed may subsequently die, but remains preserved in the photograph, while the dead body photographed is 'horrible' since it is given the same 'immortality'". To me, photographs of the dead are undesirable because I'd much rather remember a person as alive than dead, but the irony that is presented in this section is extremely interesting.
Reading about the different ways in which photographers want to depict the dead was also intriguing to me. The photograph on page 203 looks like a sleeping child to me, yet knowing that it is called "The Morgue (Fatal Meningitis)" makes it disturbing to me rather than precious. A person's attitude towards or reaction to a photograph depends entirely on the relationship between that photograph and reality... which is why in my opinion, looking at a photograph of a dead person is much different than looking at a picture of a living person who is now dead.