Victorian post-mortem photography
There's
a slightly macabre story about the great Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, a man
so dissipated he expired from chronic alcoholism in his late 30s. (His
last words purportedly were, "I've had eighteen straight whiskeys. I
think that's the record.") Lionized in America, he found the seductions
of the White Horse pub a little too much for him and keeled over with a
brain hemorrhage. His widow Caitlin recalls that when his body was being
shipped back to Wales for burial, some of the deckhands noticed his
coffin and sat down around it to play a spirited game of poker.
"How Dylan would have loved that!" she exclaimed.
Indeed.
The
coffin in the picture above doesn't contain Dylan Thomas. More
likely the photo depicts one of those Irish wakes where they like to
prop up the body with a drink in its hand and carouse all night long.
It does not really qualify as post-mortem photography except in the
broadest sense: the subject is someone who is being memorialized in a
permanent and significant way.
Before we look at any more of these, let's quote the Great and Powerful Wikipedia:Post-mortem photography (also known as memorial portraiture
or memento mori) is the practice of photographing the recently deceased.
The invention of the daguerreotype
in 1839 made
portraiture much more commonplace, as many of those who were unable to afford
the commission of a painted portrait could afford to sit for a photography
session. This cheaper and quicker method also provided the middle class with a
means for memorializing dead loved ones.
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 have 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.
The earliest post-mortem
photographs are usually close-ups of the face or shots of the full body and
rarely include the coffin.
The subject is usually depicted so as to seem in a deep sleep, or else arranged
to appear more lifelike. Children were often shown in repose on a couch or in a
crib, sometimes posed with a favorite toy or other plaything. It was not
uncommon to photograph very young children with a family member, most
frequently the mother. Adults were more commonly posed in chairs or even braced
on specially-designed frames. Flowers were also a common prop in post-mortem
photography of all types.
The effect of life was sometimes
enhanced by either propping the subject's eyes open or painting pupils onto the
photographic print, and many early images (especially tintypes and ambrotypes)
have a rosy tint added to the cheeks of the corpse.Later examples show less effort
at a lifelike appearance, and often show the subject in a coffin. Some very
late examples show the deceased in a coffin with a large group of funeral
attendees; this type of photograph was especially popular in Europe and less
common in the United States.
But
some sites devoted to this strange practice claim (correctly, I think)
that post-mortem photography reflects a fascinating and very significant
cultural shift in attitudes toward mortality. Death was much closer
then, and less sanitized; people died in their beds, were washed and
dressed and prepared for burial by loved ones. The camera was magic in
those days, a way to paint an instant portrait, but not to be used
lightly due to scarcity and cost (i.e. no one owned a camera then; you
went to a portrait studio in your best clothing, stood very still, and
didn't smile).
The
babies are the saddest, of course. Victorian women must have gone
through agony in their childbearing years, with primitive or
non-existent obstetrics, high mortality rates and a complete absence of
birth control. Almost everyone would lose an infant, more
likely several. Were people more hardened to loss back then? I doubt it.
They had to put their grief somewhere, just as we have to today.
They
needed something to hold on to, a memento. Because there were no Kodak
moments then, no digital cameras or cells or any of the gadgets with
which we so casually snap a picture, there would be no record of
Junior's first smile or first steps or first day of school.
The
post-mortem photograph, the only existing image of a baby or a child or
even an adult, would be cherished and preserved for generations (as
witness the thousands of images I found on the internet). I can feel the
melancholy behind this gesture, the aching grief in the attempt to make
a dead infant appear "lifelike".
These
waxen dolls are disturbing, but only if seen through our modern
abhorrence of anything to do with death. We die in hospitals now, often
alone. Life is prolonged past the point of any real meaning: we do it
because we can, which has come to mean that we're supposed to, that
there's no other choice. Death is the enemy, to be beaten back as long
and fiercely as possible.
People
"fight" cancer, "triumph" over it or "lose the battle". The medical
community seems embarrassed by it all. Disease isn't supposed to happen,
and if it does, it must be vanquished. I don't think the Victorians
thought in terms of losing battles, or even winning. The majority of
them were deeply Christian, which means they believed the dead
were gathered up by the Almighty and transported to a better place for
all eternity.
Spiritualism
became tremendously popular in this era, along with the belief that the
ghosts of loved ones sometimes appeared in photos. And they did, if
the photographer knew what he was doing.
The
Victorians knew that life and death were separated not by a doorway or a
passageway but by a gossamer veil, something the merest breeze
could draw aside. These eerie portraits of life-in-death convey a sense
of dwelling in that mysterious other world even while still embodied on
earth. It's a bizarre and even repugnant concept to us, but not to them.
I
try to imagine it. It's hard to go there, to put myself there. I wonder
what it would be like to touch a dead baby, to tenderly position it for a
portrait under blazing lights, to hold its likeness close for years and
years while other children came and went.
Their haunted eyes seem to stare at us through time, through space, even through the mists of death itself.
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