3 ms·

Clearing Up Some Myths About Victorian ‘Post-Mortem’ Photographs

• wincy 9y ago
  This was really interesting! Just something I believed because "why not?" and didn't give it another thought for many years. There's so much information coming at us from every angle, that if it doesn't have a major impact in my life, I often don't think critically about the information.
• Nomentatus 9y ago
  What this article leaves out is that unposed photographs of the dead (particularly children) were common in Victorian times - including in my family. My grandmother had (and I saw and was able to examine) such a photo of a dead infant, perhaps two - her sister. Her father, an interior decorator, was on a buying trip to Germany when the child became ill and died, and this may have been a factor in preserving a momento mori of the child corpse for him to see when he returned to London. Cameras weren't very portable, so taking photographs of a sick child just before death wasn't usually a possibility, as would be the case today.