Getting photos off of a dead iPhone?

I got a new iPhone December 2016 and had stopped using my old one then, although it had still worked perfectly besides normal old iPhone stuff (constant draining battery, etc). I have been trying to turn it on recently, and this thing is full-on dead it seems. Won't charge at all. I have a friend who is in the hospital and probably won't make it much longer, and I know I have pictures and videos of him on that phone. They were not in the iCloud or shared photos or whatever. My question is, if I were to bring this dead iPhone to an Apple tech support in the Apple store, is there any hope they can retrieve photos through some sort of software or opening the phone up or something? I figured the answer was no since iPhones don't have memory cards, just wondering if anyone knew if something like this was possible before I go all the way down to the store.

As Long As The Internal Storage Isn't Physically Damaged It Might Be Recoverable

If the problem is the battery, they should be able to help. You can also try local data recovery specialists.

A battery replacement should work although they can't 100% guarantee that there won't be a problem which results in your phone being restored. They will only restore it if there's a problem.