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Jun 4, 2016 · Photographs of loved ones taken after they died may seem morbid to modern sensibilities. But in Victorian England, they became a way of commemorating the dead and blunting the sharpness of...
- Why Did People Take Post-Mortem Photos?
- The Creation of Post-Mortem Photos
- Beyond Victorian Death Photos: Masks, Mourning, and Memento Mori
- Fake Victorian Post-Mortem Photos
In the first half of the 19th century, photography was a new and exciting medium. So the masses wanted to capture life's biggest momentson film. Sadly, one of the most common moments captured was death. Due to the high mortality rates, most people couldn't expect to live past their 40s. And when disease spread, infants and children were especially ...
Photographing dead people may seem like a ghastly task. But in the 19th century, deceased subjects were often easier to capture on film than living ones — because they weren't able to move. Due to the slow shutter speed of early cameras, subjects had to remain still to create crisp images. When people visited studios, photographers would sometimes ...
People in the Victorian era mourned deeply after the death of a loved one — and this mourning certainly wasn't limited to photos. It was common for widows to wear black for years after their husbands died. Some even clipped hair from their dead loved ones and preserved the locks in jewelry. As if that wasn't dark enough, Victorians often surrounded...
Today, some Victorian death photos shared online are actually fakes— or they're photographs of the living mistaken for the dead. Take, for example, a commonly shared image of a man reclining in a chair. "The photographer posed a dead person with his arm supporting the head," many captions claim. But the photograph in question is a picture of the au...
Aug 11, 2022 · Post-mortem photography provided a new means to memorialize a loved one after death, and many Victorian post-mortem photos served as family portraits in their own right. They frequently represented moms holding their dead babies or fathers looking over their dying offspring.
- Jordan Anthony
- ( Content Editor, Art Writer, Photographer )
Jul 19, 2017 · During the 1840s and early 1850s, a postmortem photo would likely have been the first and only portrait of someone. At $2 each (roughly $60 today), photographs were costly, and in America’s open...
Feb 19, 2019 · A greater understanding of the meanings behind practices such as post-mortem photography, however, allows a modern viewer to see an image for what it was: a comforting reminder that a loved one was merely “at rest” and waiting for a heavenly reunion.
Oct 11, 2021 · 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 online galleries of...
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Oct 23, 2018 · Towards the turn of the century, parents and photographers began to pose their deceased children for these photos by fixing their hair, dressing them up or even opening their eyes.
