Andy Warhol's take on mortality wasn't about memorializing. He instead focused on the direct causes of death, or the aftermath of a terrible accident. His series, Death and Disaster, is one of the most well-known and polarizing of his career. But Warhol wasn't the first artist to focus on the everyday tragedy of death as a subject to quite this revealing and exploitative extend. That honor might very well belong to someone else: an immigrant photographer working in Manhattan in the 1930s and 1940s.