Catriona Byers reflects on the emotional toll that difficult research can take.

When you study morgues, the public expects a good origin story. These usually involve a pre-teen encounter with death, some mild childhood trauma transformed into a neat narrative anecdote - an embalmed aunt, a cousin at the crematorium, a grim encounter in a neighbourhood graveyard. Sometimes, they try to guess. Perhaps you watched too many horror films before your brain developed? Were you very gothic as a child? Occasionally, there are unsubtle allusions to hidden wounds or dark secrets, a line of questioning fuelled by a lens through which the entire world is a true crime mystery waiting to be solved. Close death in the family? Difficult teenage years? How’s your mental health?

There’s something about putting death on the table that encourages people to lose their sense of decorum, like dropping a body smack-bang into the middle of a birthday party. I can’t pretend I don’t enjoy that side of it, most of the time. I’ve always hated small talk. You wouldn’t believe how many people are just waiting for a chance to discuss their cremation plans over a cheese platter. 

There’s something about putting death on the table that encourages people to lean rapidly into gallows humour, that well-worn defence mechanism. Tragedy and comedy are so closely intertwined, an attempt to cope with seeing things that shouldn’t be seen, knowing things that shouldn’t be known.

Growing up in Scotland, I spent my entire childhood learning about the histories of Mary Queen of Scots, Flora MacDonald, and the Highland Clearances (all tales united by a strong ‘evils of England’ subtext, and, on occasion, outright directness). High school was dominated by the megalomania and marriages of Early Modern European men. By the time I reached university I was obsessed with the Reformation, and, it goes without saying, extremely cool. 

This might have continued had it not been for a twist of fate in my in my final year. After incorrectly registering for my modules during my year abroad, I was allotted the only thing left on my return: a difficult class ruled over by a cruel, mercurial professor I later discovered was so universally disliked that  - rumour has it - someone once anonymously painted ARSEHOLE on his office door.

The class was on nineteenth-century urban history. Somewhere amidst Marx and mid-century misogyny, I stumbled upon the girls of the Salpêtrière. Haunting photographs, so-called hysteria in action - euphoria, terror, anger, giddiness, sensuality, horror, and something unreadable, some untapped well of pain. Something always tantalisingly out of frame, just out of reach. In a now-untraceable journey, this led me to discover late nineteenth-century French spirit photography too, ghostly spectres appearing behind grieving loved ones in a spectacular display of miraculous phenomena and early Photoshop. I began a dissertation exploring the futile quest of both medical doctors and Spiritists to produce visible evidence of the invisible.

By that winter, the episodes of darkness that had always plagued me had begun to leak into my daily life. I would start crying in the middle of a class and walk out, but the storm clouds followed me home, where I shivered and sleepwalked and stared at the ceiling until small circles formed. I found myself clinging to these women, these photographs, these scraps of ghosts and expressions of unbearable mourning. I needed to understand them. I got a grant to go to Paris for a few days for research, and hated almost every minute of it. The city was cold and unfriendly, and I didn’t have any money, and I spent every evening eating cheese and ham baguettes in a sagging single bed in my hotel room feeling deeply unhappy. I went back to Manchester, got diagnosed with depression, doped myself up to the eyeballs, submitted my dissertation late and graduated with no intention to ever return to academia. I became a food photographer, immersing myself in the land of the living, in restaurant reviews and street food launches and boozy industry parties. I started a magazine. I moved to Paris.

Eventually, the itch called me back, some unfinished business. I missed the girls. I was still haunted by the edges of the frame, trying to know something unknowable. I began a masters in urban history. I found the Paris morgue, and the New York morgue, and somehow these buildings became a container for everything I had been looking for, compelled and repelled in equal measure by the darkness, the mundane, the bold spectacle of endless deaths made so explicitly public. I found morgue photography, and crime scene photography, and power and oppression and policing. I found a pauper cemetery on a lonely island in the Long Island Sound. I found transgression, taboo, grief, tragedy, violence, poignancy, pain, tenderness, art, relief, horror, and unexpected joy. I found everything I’d always wanted to say out loud, a way of bringing some darkness into the light. And I found plenty of people who wanted to talk about it, too. 

This experience of my work makes me want to be able to offer that freedom to others, to exist as a repository for any kind of expression, no matter how dark or painful or shameful it may feel in the telling. I’m still figuring out where to put it all, how to let these things pass through me and not congeal inside. A friend who works in human rights tells me what happened recently in a war-torn city, in a war-torn country, when the men broke through the prison wall and reached the women. Someone tells me they heard a rumour that morgues avoid hiring men, and I explain why. People regularly tell me about the deaths of their relatives, or loved ones, or their own concerns about the end. My therapist truly earns her monthly cheque. 

In most cases, I’ve probably seen or heard worse. Last week I went to the library to study a book filled with nineteenth-century crime scene photographs. One shows a young woman, naked, face-down on a bed. The author writes, in neutral French, was the victim raped before (or after) her death? 

I try to look the dark things in the eye and not let them colour my life or make me afraid, despite the seemingly endless parade of dead women, dead women, dead women. I try to keep things contained, avoiding the vast majority of podcasts and popular TV shows exploring the depraved depths of the human psyche, instinctively keeping any true crime tales past the 1950s at a distance - before that, I can tell myself we’ve changed. Before that I can tell myself its just film noir, gangsters in hats and suits playing Hollywood, or big cities before we brought them under an illusion of control, sanitised them, made them somewhere I can walk some streets at night alone and still make it home. 

Have I made enough jokes, so far? Does it seem like I’m coping? I don’t want you to worry about me. The experience of immersing yourself in dark, horrific, tragic, abject material is changeable and hard to predict, even after years. Some things barely touch you; others leave a permanent scar. I looked at hundreds of morgue photographs one afternoon at an archive in Brooklyn and went happily to a dinner that night, enthusiastically sharing my findings across the dinner table with the glitterati of the art world. I saw a series of explicit forensic studies from 1908 at a library in New Haven and broke clean in two, finding myself with no choice but to take the rest of the summer off with burnout. 

I’m better at recognising the warning signs, now. I prepare myself in advance, approaching my research in intensive bursts. During those weeks I cook comforting food, go to bed early, cocoon myself at home. I expect to feel odd and detached and upset and confused. I trust that it will pass, eventually.  What else can I do? I make myself a lovely, lovely life around the edges of all of it. I live in a beautiful place, I surround myself with friends, I drink good wine, I eat good food, I say yes to every possible excitement, every proffered adventure. I go to therapy. I cry on the floor, as and when required. I’m still drawn to this work, still trying to grasp some truth just out of reach, still want to bring the dead back to life. I trust that I'll know when it’s time to stop. 

Dark research cracks you open, leaving you with a choice: either let everything come flooding in, or try desperately to close up the gaps. I let it all flood in, accepting the painful underbelly of knowing darkness so intimately. Embracing the constant reminder of what it means to be alive in the face of so much death. Trying to make the most of every moment until the unknown, unknowable end. 

Catriona Byers is a PhD candidate at Kings College, London.  Her research focuses on on the nineteenth-century morgues of Paris and New York, alongside projects relating to the history of crime scene photography, and the redevelopment of American pauper cemeteries. You can find out more about Cat and her work here.