Modern audiences generally consider antiquarian photographs of the dead, decomposing, and dissected as offensive relics; mementos of a bygone era that are as disgusting as they are disturbing. Over the last two centuries, cultural perceptions about death and dead bodies have fluctuated repeatedly, shaping new and complex ways in which societies, accept, discuss, and deny the realities surrounding human mortality, their mortality. This denial, which usually entails some form of suppression, in turn establishes pervasive socially resistant attitudes toward death's consideration as a universal and natural phenomenon. Therefore, by proxy, those who demonstrate an affinity for the subject of death must exist on the antithetical outskirts of societal normativity.

Relatively recent cultural trends in the United States often identify a particular interest in or acceptance of death as something unnatural or morbid – this is especially true when it comes to collecting or collections of its cultural relics, such as photographs. Public discourse over such imagery often employs equivalent tropes (disgusting, disturbing) in order to satiate the demands of a dominant conservative culture. In the curatorial sense, mitigating public sensitivities over ‘disturbing’ content involves describing and defining said imagery in the safest yet basest ways possible. Safest, to not offend the beliefs, ethics, morals, or aesthetic sensibilities of sensitive stakeholders; basest, to connote a tacit understanding (again to this type of viewer) that images classified ‘as disgusting as they are disturbing’ are neither personally condoned nor culturally sanctioned.

When disapproval of socially transgressive visual materials, like dissection photographs, is perpetrated by an expert – such as a curator, professor, auctioneer, archivist, or historian – implications abound that these images are in fact abnormal outliers; unrecognized and unaccepted as essential components of a larger medium's established historiography.