Oh man! Postmortem portrait photography.

[Louis Pacilla]

After checking out the "Oldest Photographs?" video post(Terrific BTW) I ran across this You Tube video of a collection of postmortem portrait photographs. The Music is a bit to much but then again it does fit the overall mood of the subject matter.

I know folks collect postmortem images but seeing this many grouped together at once is super creepy but powerful and deep.

Check it out. What do you think?


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZB5951GgF8

[William Whitaker]

Lots of children...

[Leigh]

Sally Mann is/was doing a series on a bunch of corpses set out in a yard to decay.

- Leigh

[Oren Grad]

I had the good fortune to see the big Southworth & Hawes show some years back. The postmortem portraits of children were at the same time exquisite and almost unbearable to look at.

http://museum.icp.org/museum/exhibit...rtem_port.html

[lenser]

You might also find James van der Zee's "Harlem Book of the Dead" of equal interest. Lovely photography of obviously very much loved family members.

[slackercruster]

I like. The soundtrack is a pain. But the pix are nice.

[W K Longcor]

In my first job at a photo studio, we got quite a few requests for these "portraits". Often they were of elderly people who had come to America from "the old country". The family usually wanted to send a picture back to family in Europe to show that they had done well by "grandma" at her funeral. I remember one family who came back to he studio. Grandma had never had a portrait done of herself. They thought that my boss had done such a wonderful job with the photo -- it looked just like grandma. Would it be possible to make a finished print ---- with her eyes open !!!!! Fortunately, the boss's wife was a superior retouch artist, and the task was accomplished -- the portrait looked "just like grandma!"

[BrianShaw]

My family still takes pictures of dearly departed in the box... but I know of nobody who ever looks at them again.

[E. von Hoegh]

Sally Mann is/was doing a series on a bunch of corpses set out in a yard to decay.

- Leigh

http://sallymann.com/selected-works/body-farm

[Vaughn]

Lots of children...

People (in developed countries, anyway) now cannot even fathom the death rate of kids under the age of one year old during those times. Pre-1900 in a 'bad' year (bad weather, war, etc), over half died before they reached one year old...and in 'good' years perhaps 150 to 250 per 1000 died. In the USA now, the figure is less than 10 per 1000 (it was 7 per 1000 in 1997).

Safe to say we have a very different concept of death now than when those photos were taken.