"A friend of mine gave me a book with reproductions of photos of dead babies. My first reaction was revulsion. But then I thought about it some more and realized that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the camera was an extraordinary new device at a time when infant mortality and poverty were widespread. And that photographing infants who had died was widespread. The children in these drawings were Mexican, and were known as "Angelitas", blameless souls who had entered heaven.

The images, though grotesque to our sensibilities, are simply a natural expression of grief. Surely there is nothing abhorrent in the wish to remember a loved one through a photograph. We think nothing of remembering our dead spouses, relatives, or friends with pictures that adorn our homes. Why then do we condemn this form of photography? Perhaps we shrink from these representations of dead babies because of our own fear of death."