Teacher showing photos to kids of victorian dead children - slightly disturbing

Most research institutes, and nearly all of the ones in humanities subjects, are part of universities, so they are funded by the universities themselves, university library research endowments, and/or partly by grant income from research funds (in both the U.K. and the US). They will normally be embedded in a university department or school, and will bring together visiting scholars, senior professors, and PhD students.

A research institute in a humanities subject in the US will most often be at what used to be called an “R1” (or big, top-tier) university.

In U.K. universities some humanities research institutes (or some posts in them) are part-funded by the U.K. research councils.

It’s funded by a company called Flash Bang Wallop - From Beyond the Grave 💀 👻

I recently went with a primary school class to Manchester Museum (Y4). The vast majority were absolutely fascinated to see the unwrapped mummified remains of Asru and it was very sensitively handled by the staff who talked to the kids about respect and how the museum would do things differently now. They also asked children to pick their favourite object and made it clear they couldn’t pick Asru as she was a person not an object. No parents had an issue about the children being taken to see this despite it being much more “real” than a photograph and the kids being a lot younger.

Out of interest, what would your view be on your children seeing this OP?

@Friendlynortherner, as someone with a PhD in the area and who is part of a major research institute on the subject, well, I am afraid you just aren't correct.
For reading, can I suggest you begin with John Troyer's Technologies of the Human Corpse which has a superb chapter on the connected history of death and photography? It's also discussed in Drew Faust's This Republic of Suffering. As the book was a Pulitzer Prize finalist and Faust was Harvard President, I hope that she is respected enough of a historian for you. Or, perhaps Thomas Laqueur's The Work of Dead? Laqueur is Helen Fawcett Distinguished Professor of History at UC Berkeley. Without wishing to be a dreadful name dropper, Tom and I were discussing this topic just last week.
Or what about Jay Ruby's Secure the Shadow: Death and Photography in America? It's an older book now, but by an extremely esteemed scholar.
This doesn't mean that it hasn't become an internet trend and that many of those links that you see online are click-bait nonsense, but there is a large scholarly literature that does more than support its existence.

I didn't say it was unwarranted (but it sounds unwarranted from your explanation).

I'm just interested to know who you reported this teacher to, since it wasn't anyone in school!

No, only you have the all seeing power to know all the children, control all the classes, understand the motivations of all the children and memorise the curriculum and how it should be delivered despite not working in that classroom. We just aren’t all as special as you are, don’t hold it against us.

I find it pretty egregious to be complaining about a teacher who is just teaching some quite well known bits of cultural history, in order to interest kids in the broader period they’re studying.

@Friendlynortherner I’m a nineteenth century historian. There are plenty of contemporary sources of these, especially from France and America - including adverts by commercial photographers who offered postmortem photography services, plus contemporary comment, often by the photographers themselves, on their methods of posing subjects, etc.

Discounting the Internet ones that are actually photographs of living people, there are plenty of examples where the subjects are posed explicitly as dead; and in America, it was especially common to depict the subject in a coffin or casket. There are probably more surviving examples of postmortem photography in American collections because the practice continued in frontier America for some time after it had passed its popularity in Europe (as documented by the folk historian Michael Lesy in the 1970s).

A lot of the actual early photographs themselves are difficult to obtain since they were types of physical (ie. non-negatives/not easily copy able) photography, such as cased daguerreotypes, ambrotypes and tintypes, commissioned for private mourning and often now held in private collections (however, I’ve copied an example below held in the Met, by Alphonse Le Blondel, a well known French studio photographer of the mid-1800s).

There is also a lot of academic work on this topic going back decades now. Obviously, much of it (and the links to sources) are in academic monographs and libraries difficult to access for non-scholars, but, just for a start, take a look at these open-access resources. The Patrizia Munforte article, the next to last link below, also discusses in depth the ambivalence of not knowing whether an image is a “true” postmortem photograph or not.

https://clements.umich.edu/exhibit/death-in-early-america/ - this resource from U of Michigan is especially good, with visual examples

https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/6241/1/6241.pdf - this article includes quotations from contemporary photographers on the practice

The Yale Review | Lili Hamlyn: "Camera Mortis"

Alphonse Le Blondel | [Postmortem] | The Metropolitan Museum of Art

https://www.zora.uzh.ch/id/eprint/114469/1/The%20Body%20of%20Ambivalence.%20The%20'Alive,%20Yet%20Dead'%20Portrait%20in%20the%20Nineteenth%20Century.pdf

https://etd.ohiolink.edu/acprod/odbetd/ws/sendfile/send?accession=osu1144936478&disposition=inline

When you say you are a historian, do you mean you are an academic attached to one of the universities, and this is your area of expertise? Not really to do with the thread (the thread is about the teacher rather than the subject matter tbh) but since hoax has been raised it would be good to know more.

I skimmed over your link, I am sorry, as the name on the link didn't look like a good source - if it is my mistake then apologies. Who is the source and what are their credentials and would you mind linking again if it is at your fingertips so that I don't have to scroll back?

There is a BBC article about the photos and whilst I wouldn't say BBC journalism is the same as it once was, I am surprised they would print something without any basis at all. Perhaps some of the photos are genuine, and some are hoaxes?

Thanks

I did nearly suggest God 🤣

Probably, but all professionalism has its limits when the complaints are your level of ridiculous and unwarranted.