Her work is grueling -- she spends two to four hours on each picture -- but she has yet to turn down a photograph, no matter how grisly. Some of the photographs she gets are of 20-week fetuses with transparent skin. Others are of babies that have been dead in the womb for so long that their facial features have dissolved, requiring her to redraw them.
The next logical step would be to use photograph-aging software to interpolate the photographs into the life that never existed; advanced software would use the original photograph, as well as those of parents and siblings, to generate "photographs" of the phantom child at various ages, "growing up" in realtime in a frame on the mantlepiece. I can see a sci-fi/gothic-horror short story in this...
Actually, nothing 's new. Years ago a read about a corsican museum where theu exhibit Napoleon's skull at age 12, when he became emperor of Franc, and when he died. Way before photography, computers or digital touching-up were invented.
> I can see a sci-fi/gothic-horror short story in this...
Me too. Well - an SF one anyway. Mind if I take a swing at it - laziness permitting?