Death in Miniature

Over the weekend I had a conversation which led me to chance upon this rather sinister little project created by Frances Glessner Lee. Lee was prevented from attending medical school because she was a woman and through her interest in medicine, forensics's and dollhouses was inspired to create 18 dioramas of scenes of unnatural death, from suicide to murder all contained within dollhouse rooms. The rooms were photographed by Corinne Botz and are collected together in a compelling book called 'The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death', from which the photos one here come. What struck me was the amazing detail in the dioramas, from blood spatters to buckshot in a wall to the face of a doll an eery red from carbon monoxide poisoning...these studies play upon our most morbid curiosities and within each on lies a story of life cut short be it by one's own hand or that of another. The dioramas are still in use today as forensic teaching aids but like murder mystery fiction or true life accounts of murder they stir up the intrigue, the outrage and the voyeur in the layman much more than they do the desensitized student of forensics; these microcosmic tombs forever telling the tale of their tiny
inhabitant's grisly end.

For those as morbidly curious as me more of the Botz photos can be found here:

Nutshell Studies