Photos of the dead

But there is a long history of photographing the notorious dead and spreading the photos around the world. If you go on line, you can see photos of Jesse James in his coffin, John Dillinger laid out in preparation for burial, and the members of the Dalton gang who were killed in the Coffeyville, Kan., bank robbery of 1892. In some of the Dalton photographs, members of the Coffeyville community are posing with the dead.

I believe entrepreneurs even sold copies of the Dalton photographs.

And then there are any number of mob hit photographs -- dead mobsters sprawling in the streets of Manhattan, oozing blood in barber's chairs, slumped at the wheel of their new Caddy, the Caddy and the man both full of holes. The stuff of tabloid journalism made famous by the New York photographer WeeGee whose work included "Their First Murder" -- excited Brooklyn kids, some smiling at the camera as the police prepare to remove from the street the body of a dead racketeer.

And perhaps the most famous tabloid example of all: The photograph of the death of Ruth Snyder in the electric chair at Sing Sing in 1928. Snyder, a Queens housewife, and her boyfriend were convicted of murdering her husband. The photo appeared on the front page of the New York Daily News under the headline "Dead!"

The taste for and tolerance of such photographs has obviously changed -- just as there are no more public hangings in the United States. And think about Matthew Brady's civil war photographs -- many of them featuring entire fields of the dead. It is hard to imagine they would be acceptable in major publications today if straight from the battlefield.

We have changed. Whether we have evolved into higher consciousness, that's another question. There still is no shortage of violence and cruelty to be photographed.

-- Michael Carey