"These photographs served less as a reminder of mortality than as a keepsake to remember the deceased. This was especially common with infants and young children; Victorian era childhood mortality rates were extremely high, and a post-mortem photograph might've been the only image of the child the family ever had. The later invention of the carte de visite, which allowed multiple prints to be made from a single negative, meant that copies of the image could be mailed to relatives.
The practice eventually peaked in popularity around the end of the 19th century and died out as "snapshot" photography became more commonplace, although a few examples of formal memorial portraits were still being produced well into the 20th century." From Wikipedia More here
Extensive collection of post mortem photography
“What a comfort it is to possess the image of those who are removed from our sight. We may raise an image of them in our minds but that has not the tangibility of one we can see with our bodily eyes.”
–Flora A. Windeyer, in a letter to Rev. John Blomfield, November 1870
Secure the Shadow…Ere the Substance Fades
By Elizabeth Kelley Kerstens, CGRS, CGL
Someday you might run across an old photograph of someone who seems to be posed in an odd and unnatural way, or perhaps the person appears to be sleeping. It’s just possible that you will have stumbled upon a fairly rare—from a collector’s standpoint—form of photography known as postmortem photography.
Postmortem photography, or memento mori, was used to capture the image of a loved one who had just died. This practice was particularly popular during the latter half of the nineteenth century, although the practice persists today in some cultures.
To our early twenty-first-century sensibilities, this photographic practice may appear morbid, but to the procurers and owners of such photos, the practice was necessary and normal for dealing with grief. Death was a common occurrence in the nineteenth century, and every household was touched by it. In the United States in 1850, the average life expectancy at birth was 38.9 years; this life expectancy had risen only to 49.6 years by 1900. Similarly, the infant mortality rate in 1850 was 217.4 per 1,000 births; that number decreased by nearly 50 percent to 120.1 per 1,000 births by 1900.
With so much death around them, Victorian Americans dealt with grief very differently than we do today. Mourning was very much a part of everyday life in the nineteenth century, accompanied by mourning symbols such as jewelry, black crepe and wreaths, and prescribed clothing for the mourning period. As advances were made in medical science and funerary practices, however, views toward open expression of grief changed. According to Jay Ruby, author of Secure the Shadow, “From the beginning of the twentieth century until the 1970s, death became a forbidden subject among the ‘Americanized’ middle class.”
Photographing Death
Photography was invented in 1839 by Louis Daguerre in France. The first form that photographs took was called the “daguerreotype” after the founder of the method. Daguerreotypes quickly became popular in the United States. Many people who would never have been able to afford a painted portrait were able to afford to sit for the new photographic process. In Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America, author Stanley Burns notes that during the period 1841–60, “an estimated 30 million daguerreotypes of all types [were] taken in America.” Yet, because of the high mortality rates, there were many people that were never able to get their photograph taken while alive.
Enter the entrepreneurial professional photographer. To help generate more business, photographers advertised that they took postmortem photos in a timely manner. Grieving family members could contact these photographers and have the photos taken either in the studio or in the home of the deceased.
During this time period, it was popular to make the deceased appear to be in a deep sleep. To accomplish this, the person was placed on a sofa or bed in the home and posed comfortably, with eyes closed and head possibly propped on a pillow (figure 1 and figure 2). This was the pose most commonly found by author Ruby in his study of the period 1840 to 1880. Frequently props were added to the setting, such as a toy, a cross, or even flowers. Props such as these, when found in a photo, may help clarify if the person was alive or dead at the time.
Another popular method of posing the deceased attempted to make the person appear to be alive by the positioning of the body. Many images show the person sitting in a chair, or the image may be positioned vertically to give the appearance that the person is sitting upright. Occasionally, the eyes of the deceased might have been left open, or the image was doctored to make the eyes appear to be open.
During the early years of postmortem photography, it was common to obtain close-up images of adults and full-body images of children (figure 3). Additionally, at the time, caskets weren’t always readily available, so bodies were placed on boards with ice underneath to preserve them in the interim. After the Civil War, embalming became more common and bodies could be photographed in their final resting place inside the casket (figure 4).
Sometimes parents posed with a dead child in their arms or on a lap. These photos may have been designed to show the great emotion that the parent felt at the loss of his or her child, or there may be no evidence of emotion at all. These images characteristically show the child with his or her eyes closed—an easy way to determine that the child was not alive at the time of the photograph. A variation on this theme was to have a parent or spouse pose for the photo in mourning clothes, holding an image of the deceased.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the acceptance of postmortem photographs was starting to change. At that time, images began to appear of a flower-draped coffin with a living photo of the deceased on top (figure 5). These images were frequently taken in the parlor of the home, where most people were laid out before their funerals. This practice was common until the advent of the funeral home later in the twentieth century.
Throughout this period, it was not uncommon to find postmortem photos liberally sprinkled among the photo collections of the living, atop mantles or pianos in parlors across America. Additionally, copies of the photos would often be made and sent to family members that were unable to attend the funeral.
Finding Postmortem Photographs
Some families have postmortem images in their photo collections and may not even know it. It’s easy to spot one of these images if the deceased rests in a coffin. But the post-mortem images that are more difficult to identify are those where the person is dead but made to look alive, or even the images of those who appear asleep. Ask family members if you can see all of their older photos, and you may spot one of these. If you don’t, it’s quite possible that the images may have existed but twentieth-century relatives may not have understood their purpose and discarded them. In that case, you may find images in collections on the Internet, such as:
Dead Fred: Genealogy Photo Archive
Postmortem Photography
Thanatos.net
Tear Drop Memories
Postmortem Photographs
Dating the Photograph
Attempting to place a postmortem photo into a time period may or may not be a straightforward process. Start the identification process by determining the type of photo, i.e. daguerreotype, carte-de-visite, or other format. Time frames for the various processes can be found below. Many books and websites, including the following, point out the characteristics of the photographic formats by time period:
Burns, Stanley B. Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America. N.P.: Twelvetrees Press, 1990.
Gernsheim, Alison. Victorian and Edwardian Fashion: A Photographic Survey. New York: Dover Publications, 1981.
Leggatt, Robert. A History of Photography from Its Beginnings to the 1920s. Online at: http://www.rleggat.com/photohistory/.
Newhall, Beaumont. The History of Photography. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1982.
Nickell, Joe. Camera Clues: A Handbook for Photographic Investigation. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1994.
Taylor, Maureen A. Uncovering Your Ancestry Through Family Photographs. Cincinnati: Betterway Books, 2000.
Spirit Photography
Spiritualism became popular in the United States in the latter half of the nineteenth century, concurrent with the growth in photographic processes. Because many people believed that spirits appeared during seances, some enterprising photographers discovered ways to “capture” the essence of these spirits using photographic methods. Despite the exposure as frauds of many of the photographers and mediums, the craze ran rampant throughout the country.
The photographers created their images using several different techniques. If someone had recently died, the photographer obtained an image of the person and double-exposed that image as a ghost onto another photograph. Some other photographers had people pose in shrouds and would use these images along with customers’ images to produce the desired result (figure 6). Sometimes the “ghost” images were recognized by fellow citizens, but the holder of the image often saw what he or she wanted to see because of grief. Other tricks were used in the dark room, including creating pre-exposed plates prior to a seance or photographic sitting.
Funeral Cards
Funeral cards were prepared for family members and friends as a remembrance of the deceased. The cardstock cards usually measured about 4" x 6" and contained funerary symbolism and one of a selection of verses. They also contained some vital statistics about the deceased, including birth and death dates. In later years, these cards frequently contained an image taken of the deceased while alive (figure 7).
Companies that printed the funeral cards would search the local papers for obituaries, prepare a card, and send it quickly to the next of kin on speculation. A price list accompanied the funeral card so the family would know how to purchase additional cards, if desired. Word of mouth helped to make these cards popular and eventually people would approach the printers with their own requests. These types of memorials still exist today, offered by funeral homes in paper form.
Conclusion
Many of us are fortunate to inherit family photographs that give us glimpses into the lives of our forebears. Those of us who have found postmortem images in these collections should be able to empathize with the pain and grief felt surrounding the premature loss of a parent, spouse, or child. Instead of being repelled by the image, we can better understand our ancestors by appreciating why postmortem photography was popular in the nineteenth century.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Elizabeth Kelley Kerstens, CGRS, CGL, is the managing editor of Genealogical Computing and the NGS NewsMagazine and a frequent contributor to Ancestry Magazine.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Original article here
No comments:
Post a Comment