Captured Forever

An exhibit on post-mortem photography in the 19th Century.

The first pictures that a parent today takes of their child is very likely to be soon after its birth.  The first one of my daughter was a polaroid snapped only a few hours after delivery, the one of my son, again a polaroid, perhaps even sooner.  These snaps were rapidly shared with family and friends - scanned, printed and emailed as this was before social media but post internet.  Scanning family photographs of the 19^th century in North America, it was then surprising to discover a wealth of pictures of babies and young children were in fact taken post-mortem.  As Hollander points out the “grim statistics” reported in a mid-19^th century publication that had infant mortality at 22% for children under one years-old, 37% for children under five and 45% in total for children under fifteen[1].  Understandably the number of dead children commemorated in photographs would be then quite significant. 

Whilst the portal to post-mortem photography in the 19^th century was for me those of babies and young children, the practice included all members of the family including beloved pets.  Post-mortem photography was a natural extension of posthumous portraiture[2] that was already established as means to capture the likeness of a loved one albeit for only those that could afford it.  Compared to the cost of a painting or portrait for $50[3], the price for a daguerreotype in 1842 was around $2.50- $6.00, a tintype in 1870 a nickel, a dozen cabinet cards for $2.00 in 1886 [4].

Initially post-mortem photography was a little crude. Laderman suggests there is a visible puritanical, Calvinist frankness in these photographs where the body is merely a vessel whose disintegration supported the belief of human sin and corruptibility[5].  In reality, the means to preserve the dead was relatively primitive until the perfection of the embalming process used during the Civil War.  Until then any decomposition could only be arrested by laying the body on a board over ice[6]. Photographers were prized for their speed in getting to a family as much as their styling. Such was the popularity of taking photographs on the deathbed that photographers of the time shared their tidbits on how to take the better pictures and how to deal with the practicalities of the just-dead including how to open the eyes and manage the fluids from the nose and mouth.[7]

As America shifted to a more evangelical Protestantism, so did the desire to capture a soul and focus on “a more hopeful and promising eternal joyful life of the spirit when the body expires”[8]  Post-mortem photographs went quickly from frank records of the deceased to aesthetic idealism.  Perhaps heavily influenced by Henry Peach Robinson[9] and his work “Fading Away” [10], representations of death morphed into posed last slumbers. Symbolic posies of flowers upside down, clocks stopped, and closed books gesture to death[11] and where family members were present, they posed melodramatically sitting or standing over the slumbering corpse in the same manner as Robinson’s classic photograph.  This aesthetic posturing likely made the addition of the post-mortem photograph acceptable for the mantelpiece and family portrait wall.  Given the ease that photographs could be produced as cabinet cards or cartes de visites, they would have likely been distributed to family and friends as memorial photographs but perhaps could also be considered a form of “virtue signalling” too.

Once embalmment became an established practice in the late 1800s, the work of death moved to professional funeral homes and with it the photography practice too.  Beautifully lined polished caskets and elaborate flower arrangements replaced the homely “last sleep” closeup.  Attention shifting to the funeral “show”.  Fernandez suggests memorial and by extension post-mortem photography as “a type of ritual seeking to preserve the body in life, to ward off the corpse, and rescue the memory of the deceased from the materiality of his or her body”.[12]  The rise of the funeral home and services would have certainly also met these needs and by the early 20^th century post-mortem photographs do seem to have waned replaced by pictures of the funerals.

I wonder if post-mortem photography will make a comeback in the age of the digital camera. The practice of taking pictures of stillborn babies in neo-natal wards has long been encouraged to help the grieving process[13] and they often echo the poses found in post-mortem pictures from the century before. With digital, a film processing technician or professional photographer can be eliminated and polished vernacular pictures instead dominate present social media. When my cousin offered to take a photograph of my grandmother in a coffin from the other side of the world, I said yes immediately.  I have images of her alive and now dead for what are we in photographs but people frozen in time.

The three photographs in my exhibition span the history of post-mortem photography in the 19^th century and yet hold a deliberately eerie aesthetic that would also resonate with today’s Instagram social media audience in their content and form and like the cabinet cards, invite distribution and participation.  As Fernandez points out “images of corpses possess an animation and narrative that survives time”[14] and I predict that we may see these “shadows” again.