On May 1, 1947, 23-year-old Evelyn McHale leapt to her death from the 86th floor observation deck and landed on a United Nations limousine parked at the curb. Photography student Robert Wiles took a photo of McHale's corpse a few minutes after her death. The police found a suicide note among possessions she left on the observation deck: "He is much better off without me … I wouldn’t make a good wife for anybody". The photo ran in the May 12, 1947 edition of LIFE Magazine and is often referred to as ‘The Most Beautiful Suicide’.

Inspired, by seeing this photograph, firstly as a child, reprinted in 'Best of Life' and recalled again many years later. McHale's body dented the car so badly that it almost formed around her. However, outwardly she is unmarked, passive and beautiful - she looks like a model. From this initial starting point resulted a series of images entitled 9 lives that Mel Bagshaw has been photographing since 2007.

The photographs adopt the language of fashion with their staged poses, constructed environments, attention to detail and careful choice of clothes and accessories They use the imagery of reportage photography, the constructed tableaux of early photography (including post mortem photography), Renaissance and Victorian painting with their visual clues, lighting and subtext. However as a whole, the photographs draw on a long tradition of romantic themes of suicide, tragic endings and noble deaths in art, literature, poetry, music, film and theatre.