Post mortem images

In 1772, the artist Charles Willson Peale painted a portrait of his deceased child, Margaret, to remember her. Years later, Peale added his wife Rachel standing over the child in mourning. This 18th-century painting predated the trend of post-mortem photography. Charles Willson Peale/Philadelphia Museum of Art By positioning post-mortem photographs upright in the frame, families avoided the impression that their deceased child was only asleep. For many grieving families of the time, a post-mortem photograph was often the only image they had of their child. Sepia Times/Universal Images Group via Getty Images View Gallery Thanks to high mortality rates and the rampant spread of disease, death was everywhere during the Victorian era. So many people came up with creative ways to remember the dead — including Victorian death photos. While it may sound macabre today, countless families used post-mortem photos to memorialize their lost loved ones. "It is not merely the likeness which is precious," said Elizabeth Barrett Browning, a Victorian-era English poet, as she gazed upon a post-mortem portrait, "but the association and the sense of nearness involved in the thing... the very shadow of the person lying there fixed forever!" For many people of the Victorian era, a post-mortem portrait might be their first experience with photography. The relatively new technology presented an opportunity to retain a permanent image of their deceased relatives — many of whom had never been phot...

At first glance, the faded 1903 photograph of Mme Debeinche’s bedroom, bound in the yellowed pages of an early 20th-century album, shows what looks to be an unremarkable middle-class Parisian apartment of the time. The overstuffed room brims with floral decoration, from the wallpaper and heavy swag curtains to the carpeting, chair upholstery—even the chamber pot. A large reproduction of Alexandre Cabanel’s voluptuous 1863 painting, “Birth of Venus,” hangs on the wall. A sizeable unmade bed with a hefty carved-wood frame dominates the scene. Bedroom of Madame Debeinche, murdered May 5, 1903. From this angle,the scene looks unsettling, with the picture askew and the dark stain on the bed. But on closer look, there is something unnerving about the tableau. The Venus is crooked. A spindle chair lies on its side. And a curious dark stain has pooled on the otherwise clean white linen sheets. One need only to turn the page of the album to solve the mystery, since the next photo captures the grislier sight on the floor behind the bed: the Madame’s dead body. When the Paris police investigated Mme Debeinche’s May 1903 murder, they began by photographing the crime scene. And while that might seem mundane to anyone accustomed to TV police procedurals, documenting foul play was a relatively novel use of the camera in 1903. Her bedroom remains one the earliest recorded crime scenes, and the Madame herself has the unfortunate distinction of being one of the earliest murder victims prese...

All of this happening at the same time as advances in photography led to the prevalence of postmortem photos, where Victorians would haul out their dead, prop them up on stands, and take a picture worth a thousand words. These stands helped corpses look alive, and allowed them to be posed with their still-breathing family members. Or so the story goes. Fake postmortem photos, whether categorized in error or intentionally mislabeled to sell for profit, have in recent years become widespread on the Internet. They fill A photographer appears to photograph himself, with a large-view camera and an adjustable head clamp apparatus. In truth, the propped-up people in Victorian “postmortems” look alive for a much simpler reason: They are. Posing stands were used to help living models hold still for that era’s longer exposures, though even that is misleading. “[Long exposure] is a deceiving term,” says Mike Zohn, a longtime photographer and the owner of “When people talk about long exposure, it sounds like people had to wait for half an hour,” Zohn says. “They did not. But an exposure of even one second is long enough to allow for blurring. So they had posing stands.” A Victorian posing stand. Mike Zohn According to the website Other so-called postmortems are often assumed to be of dead people because something seems “spooky.” Too-stiff posture, unnatural-looking eyes, or eerie shadows can easily start a photo’s postmortem career, and much of this supposed evidence is, again, just e...

Photography owes much of its early flourishing to death. Not in images depicting the aftermath of violent crimes or industrial accidents. Instead, through quiet pictures used to comfort grieving friends and relatives. These postmortem photographs, as they are known, were popular from the mid-19th through the early-20th centuries—common enough to grace mantelpieces. Many can be viewed anew at online resources like the Historians estimate that during the 1840s, the medium’s first decade, as cholera swept through Britain and America, photographers recorded deaths and marriages by a ratio of three to one. Budding practitioners had barely learned to handle the bulky machinery and explosive chemicals before they were asked to take likenesses of the dead: to bend lifeless limbs into natural poses and mask tell-tale signs of sickness, racing against rigor mortis. Many people find photos of the dead creepy or morbid. No question, postmortem photographs are sorrowful images. They capture the ravages of illness. They depict grieving parents. They show wives caressing the faces of lost husbands, just for a chance to be tender toward them one last time. And they portray unbearably beautiful children, poised as if asleep, surrounded by the toys they played with while alive. But today, the sorrow of these images lies elsewhere: in treating pictures of the dead like obscenities rather than as memento mori. * * * Photography extended the centuries-old traditions of During the 1840s and ear...

In the 1800s, taking a photo of a dead body wasn’t creepy—it was comforting. In an era when photos were expensive and many people didn’t have any pictures of themselves when they were alive, post-mortem photography was a way for families to remember their deceased loved ones. This was especially true for children, whose mortality rate was much higher than it is now. “We look at them today sort of with shock and awe, but…these photographs were taken in love,” says Elizabeth Burns, creative and operations director at the Post-mortem photography began shortly after photography’s introduction in 1839. In these early days, no one really posed the bodies or cleaned them up. A poorer family might lay a nice dress across the body of a person who died in shabbier clothes before a photographer took a picture, but there was little beautifying of the corpse. In one of the pictures in this gallery, you can even see blood coming out of the deceased person’s mouth. Because people during this period died in their homes rather than hospitals, photographers made house calls to take these pictures. Americans kept the photos in hard cases that they might display on their mantel or keep in private. In Europe, it was more common to frame these photos and hang them on the wall. Europeans also took pictures of dead celebrities like Victor Hugo and sold them as cards. Towards the turn of the century, parents and photographers began to pose their deceased children for these photos by fixing their h...

Image via bbc.com The photo above is an extended family gathered in the parlor to pose for a portrait – or is it? Photographs were increasingly becoming more affordable and accessible in the late 1850’s, but the family still put on their best clothes for the event. Upon viewing the image almost two-hundred years later, perhaps audiences today would be shocked, even horrified, to discover that the young girl asleep with her favorite teddy bear in the forefront had recently died. Post-mortem photography of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century is, at first glance, difficult to spot. Is a family member’s neck at a strange angle? Many are in a reclining position, slightly propped up to seem like they are supporting themselves. Do their eyes look strange? Maybe the photographer painted eyes on the image after development. Is only one figure in focus? Nineteenth-century photography required that subjects remain absolutely still, or else they would appear blurry in the picture. The deceased, of course, were very skilled at remaining still for portraits. This child’s eyes are hand-painted open on tintype, circa 1870. Image via Burns Archive via HIstory.com Americans in the 1800s were far more intimately acquainted with death than we are today. Most of this was out of necessity–before embalming procedures became popularized, it was the duty of the family to quickly prepare the body for a viewing and burial. Families would typically hold viewings in their own parlors at ho...