Victorian Postmortem Photography

[paulr]

I was unaware of this tradition until this week. Fascinating and weird. Special thanks to my parents for never making me pose with a dead child held upright by clamps.

http://io9.com/the-strangest-tradition-of-the-victorian-era-post-mort-472772709

(most of the eyeballs are painted on their lids by retouchers)

[C_Remington]

Finally, a way to take portraits using long exposure.

[Bernice Loui]

Deaths during infancy was common during the Victorian era, images like these were one of the ways parents remembered their lost children...


Bernice

[cowanw]

August Sander had twins, one survived.
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/sander-my-wife-in-joy-and-sorrow-al00048

[paulr]

Yes, it completely makes sense. Even for kids and adults; photography was expensive and many people proabably didn't have pictures of family members at all.

I'm wondering if you could find one of those corpse-posing stands in an old Sears catalog.

[Oren Grad]

http://museum.icp.org/museum/exhibitions/southworth_hawes/pages/postmortem_port.html

I saw this daguerreotype "in the flesh" as part of the big Southworth and Hawes show that made its way around some years back. No weird clamp stuff, just a delicate, exquisitely beautiful portrait rendered bittersweet by the understanding of what it was showing.

[C. D. Keth]

Here's a bit different postmortem. My Dad wants to recreate this with me when the weather gets nicer.

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[Richard Wasserman]

And of course there is Michael Lesy's "Wisconsin Death Trip." Some photos from the book— http://www.flickr.com/photos/whsimages/sets/72157602476458793/

[Ari]

Egads, this is creepier than the catacombs!

[Tim Meisburger]

In about 1997 I was working in northeast Cambodia among the hill tribes there when a friend came to visit. I took him out to the villages to see the lifestyle of the shifting cultivators and we had great fun shooting 35mm. In one village people gathered round and a family asked if we could shoot their child. We said sure, of course, and were laughing and joking till we got to a little bamboo hut with a child laid out inside, powdered and decorated for funeral rites. Very sobering. We did shoot the child, and I did go back to the village with a print, probably the only picture they had of their dear departed. Haunting...

[ShannonG]

I have a nice collection of postmortem glass plates.Here is one of them. When enlarged on my computer i could see that there is a bullet hole in the center of the bible.This is a family member that i found in a stack of plates.The other plates are of farms and steam tractors.
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[ShannonG]

Shot around 1864 or so near Cedar Falls Iowa..In a farm house (we can still see the foundation) next to the Cedar River..

[MonkeyTreeSupreme]

wow ive never witnessed this. Great find!