Our culture has been extraordinarily successful at screening the reality of ‘death’ from sight. Death still remains something of a taboo subject, and the look the dead possess – despite countless TV and movie depictions – is unfamiliar to most of us.

When I came across a box of morgue photographs from 1918 that lacked documentation, I was both baffled and intrigued. Not by the horror that offered itself up to my gaze as I went through the contents on the light-box, but by the serenity I discovered in the features of many of those portrayed. All of the individuals photographed in this sequence of negatives are male, most are fairly young to middle-aged, a shroud covers each person to the neck and heads rest on a wooden block. I assume the photographs were taken for purposes of identity, coronial inquiry, or criminal investigation. Some photographs reveal cuts and bruises to faces and heads, as if the deceased has suffered a fall, or was involved in a fight with an assailant before death. Other photographs in the box, including the example shown above, reveal no signs of physical trauma whatsoever. Could some of these photographs relate to deaths from natural causes, I wondered? I knew that in 1918 a flu pandemic killed millions around the world, young, old as well as those in the prime of life. The pandemic lasted from March 1918 to June 1920 and effected between 2 and 5 % of the global population. In NSW alone, 6387 lives were lost to the ‘Spanish flu’ in 1919.

Whatever the facts behind the deaths recorded in this box of glass plate negatives, a number of the individuals photographed, seem strangely at peace, as if experiencing a light doze from which they will rouse themselves at any moment. In book descriptions of death I had read of the ‘supreme calm and dignity’ that sometimes marks the faces of the dead. And for the first time, I understood that this was not always sentimental exaggeration or the wishful thinking of the religiously minded.