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/exhibitions/southworth_hawes/pages/postmortem_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.

[William Whitaker]

That's what I had figured, that child mortality rates 125 years ago were far above the modern norm.

[r_a_feldman]

Another book along this line is Wisconsin Death Trip.

[ederphoto]

Oh Louis ! You made me look at that ??? Now i'm going to have nightmares . That music gave me the creeps !!

[SteveR]

...I only skim-read the OP before opening what I thought was going to be a collection of Post MODERN portraits! Woops, where are my glasses...

I'll be honest, some of that was a bit hard to watch. Not because I'm squeamish or easily offended, but because since becoming a Dad I see things involving kids on a totally new level... Gawd it's been an emotional two years!

[Gudmundur Ingolfsson]

This type of photography was common all over the world up to the 1930ties. Most of the time those photographs were of people that had never been photographed when they died and after they had passed away, relatives realized they needed their picture taken to be remembered by. Photography is the memory ! The perversity of it is, that an epidemic was sometimes a great business opportunity for the local photographer.

[Marc B.]

For some of the children pictured in the video, more then a couple
of them have often been shown in documentaries about the Titanic.

Several children from the Titanic disaster were never identified...and were later
buried as unknown, with a designation of 'little girl' or 'little boy,' and a number.

So, a few of the children's pictures may have been taken,
and published...in an effort to identify their bodies.

Even today, little kids don't carry ID/travel documents...their parents do!
Back then, children didn't have/need photo passports like they do today.

[Steven Scanner]

First post since a while. I was just lurking around when I found this thread.
About a year ago we've lost our newborn son. We took a lot of pictures of the little guy, before and after he died. (he only lived for about 45 minutes). The undertaker asked us if we wanted to have a photoshoot done. Apparantly there are photographers that do this for a living. Although we liked the idea, we declined from that option. The pictures we had made ourself where enough.

About ID cards for kids: Our daughter has got her own ID card, from since she was a few months old. In the Netherlands, they used to write the name of your kids into your passport. Now they have to carry their own. It might be a good thing, but she's stuck with this card for four years. If you know how fast kids change, you'd understand that by the time she's 4, you can understand she won't look like a baby anymore.

[Brian Ellis]

Another book along this line is Wisconsin Death Trip.

My daughter gave me this book shortly after we moved to Wisconsin. It was one of the most fascinating, disturbing, sad, funny, gruesome, depressing, amusing, uplifting books I've ever read. We have no idea what we're talking about when we refer to the good old days.