‘With Dead Head’ shows Hirst posing for the camera with a severed head. The photograph was taken at a morgue in Leeds when Hirst was sixteen - he went along with a friend who was studying microbiology. This work reveals his unflinching ability to confront death and life’s brevity even at an early age, but his expression betrays an underlying fear. Around this time Hirst began to collect pathology books containing pictures of burns and wounds, and developed an interest in the work of Francis Bacon. Hirst maintained that, although he was fascinated by corpses - how they can be both visually horrific and beautiful at the same time - dead bodies still didn’t explain anything about death.